Cijrtstmastfoe tn £t Paul's SERMONS I !i!M 7 191 BEARING CHIEFLY ON THE BIRTH Q^j6iCAL OUR LORD AND THE END OF THE YEAR By H. P. LTDDON, D.D., D.C.L. CANON AND CHANCELLOR OF ST. PAUL'S Surge illuminare Jerusalem. Alleluia THIRD EDITION LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. AND NEW YORK : 15 EAST 16 th STREET 1891 CO in TO THE REVEREND ALBERT BARFF.M.A. PREBENDARY OF ST. PAUL'S, AND VICAR OF ST. GILES', CRIPPLEGATE, IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE MANY BLESSINGS OF A FRIENDSHIP WHICH HAS LASTED FOR FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS, Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/christmastideinsOOIidd PRE FA CE The ground which this volume attempts to cover is somewhat larger than its title would imply. Its central subject is the entrance of our Lord Jesus Christ into this world by being born of a human Mother. The sermons a which are devoted to the Nativity are preceded by two b for the Feast of St. Thomas. This Apostle, from his place in the Church Calendar, might seem to bid us halt on the road to Bethlehem, that we may learn from him something about that great grace of faith which enables us to recognize in Mary's Child the Eternal Word made Flesh. After Christmas Day there follow four sermons for two of the attendant festivals, 0 and six d for the last Sunday in the civil year. These naturally deal for the most part « Serm. III.-IX. b Serm. I, II. c St. Stephen's Day : Serm. X., XI. The Holy Innocents' Day : Serm. XII., XIII. a Serm. XIV.-XIX. Vlll Preface. with considerations suggested by the flight of time and the solemn issues of human life. Two sermons for the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord/ and four preached during the season of Epiphany, b 1 871, complete the volume. The last sermon 0 was published immediately after its delivery, at the desire of the late Dean Mansel. In the present publication, the order of subjects which is suggested by the Church Calendar has necessarily been substituted for that chronological arrangement which was adopted in the Advent series. May He Who took our nature upon Him, in order that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life, vouchsafe to bless some of the words here placed on record, that, not- withstanding the unworthiness of the author, they may help travellers along the road to their eternal home. Christ Church, Feast of St. Matthias, 1889. » S-rm. XX., XXI. ■> Serm. XXII.-XXV. c Serm. XXV., St. rauVs and London. CONTENTS. SERMON I. THE INCREDULITY OF ST. THOMAS. St. John xx. 25. But Thomas said unto them, Except I shall see in His Hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His Side, I will not believe . ^reathetj at St. Raul's on tlje Jcast of St. STjjomas, December 21, 18r<5 SERMON II. THE REVELATION TO ST. THOMAS St. John xiv. 5, 6. Thomas saith unto Him, Lord, we know not whither Thou goest ; and how can we Icnow the wayl Jesus saith unto him, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me . . . . . . . .18 ^reacbto at St. ^paul'g on tlje least of St. Ctjomas, December 21, 1384. SERMON III. THE GOSPEL COVENANT. Jer. xxxi. 31-34. Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will malce a New Cove- nant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that 1 madeicilh their fathers in the day X Contents. PACK that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt ; which My covenant they brake, although I was an Husband unto them, saith the Lord : but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel ; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts ; and will be their God, and they sliall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord : for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more 38 $read)eS at St. Raul's on tljc ScconS Sunijao in aibent, ©camber 1, 1879. SERMON IV. THE FAME OP EPHRATAH. Ps. cxxsii. 6. Lo, we heard of the same at Ephratah, and found it in the wood . 53 3Preach.eo at St. ^aul'a on tfjc jFcurttj Sunoap. in asbcnt, Eecember 23, 1888. SERMON V. BORN OF A WOMAN. 0 Gal. iv. 4. God sent forth His Son, made of a woman . . . .74 Jpnacbrtj at St. Raul's on GOjristmas Bag, December 25, ISSl. SERMON VI. BORN OF A VIRGIN. St. Matt. i. 22, 23. Noic all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the Prophet, saying, Behold, a Virgin shall be with Child, and shall bring forth a Son, and they shall call Ilis Name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us . .89 33rcacf)fb at St. Haiti's on tie Sunoag after Christmas, December 29, ISfS. Contents. xi SERMON VII. GOD IN HUMAN FOEM. I Tim. iii. 16. PAGE And without controversy great is the mystery of Godliness : God was manifest in the Flesh . . . . . .107 33readje!j at St. Raul's on tije JJourtrj Svmoag in atibent, December 24, SERMON VIII. THE WORD MADE FLESH. St. John i. 14. And the Word was made flesh, and dwell among us . . . 123 ^reaches at St. Ipaul'a on <£fjrigtmag Bag, December 25, IS87. SERMON IX. THE INCAENATE GOD WITH MEN. Rev. xxi. 3. And I heard a great voice out of Heaven saying, Behold, the taber- nacle of God is with men . . . . . -139 $reacteo at St. Raul's on tije Sunoag after ffijjristmaa, December 30, 1883. SERMON X. THE FIRST MAETYR. Acts vii. 60. And when he had said this, he fell asleep .... 157 33reachc6 at St. Raul's on the JFeaat of St. Stephen, December 26, 1875. Xll Contents. SERMON XI. GOOD OUT OF EVIL. Acts viii. 2-4. PAGB And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him. As for Saul, he made havoc of the Church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison. Therefore they that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the Word . . . . .175 Pttadjco at St. Paul's on tljc JTtast of St. Stepben, lUmnber 26, 1886. SERMON XII. OUR KNOWLEDGE IN THE FUTURE. St. John xiii. 7. What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter . 191 Prtarfjeo at St. Raul's on tf)e Jtast of tbe fgolg innocents, Eemnbcr 2$, 18S4. SERMON XIII. THE REASON OF SACRIFICE. 1 Chron. xxix. 14. All things come of Thee, and of Thine own have we given Thee . 209 Pnarijeo at St. Raul's on tljc jfrsst of tl)t JJoIp. Ennoctnts, Beeembrr 28, 1879. SERMON XIV. THE PERISHING AND THE IMPERISHABLE. Isa. xl. 8. The grass witkerelh, the flower fadeth : but the Word of our God shall stand for ever ....... 224 ISteatfirti «t St. haul's on ttjcSunoag aftft atbvistmaB, Btccmbtr 28, 1873. Contents. XLU SERMON XV. THE LORD OUR REFUGE. Ps. XC. I. PAGB Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge from one generation to another . 240 Preacrjeo at St. Raul's on tfje SunBap. after Christmas, December 31, 167(5. SERMON XVI. DARK VIEWS OF LIFE. Eccles. xi. 4. lie that regardeth the clouds shall not reap .... 257 preacbeb at St. Paul's on tfje Sunrjap. after (lijristmas, December 30, 18?7. SERMON XVII. LIGHT FROM HEAVEN. Ps. xxvii. 1. The Lord u my Light ....... 271 Preacieo at St. Raul's on tie Sunoarj after Cfjriatmaa, December 31, 1832. SERMON XVIII. PROVIDENCE AND LIFE. Ps. xxxi. 17. My lime is in Thy Hand . . . . . . 287 ^ieacl)co at St. Paul's on tie Sunoag after ffrjriatmns, December 30, 1888. XIV Contents. SERMON XIX. HOPE FOE A NEW YEAR. Bom. viii. 28. PAGE We know that all things work together for good to them that love God 306 ipreachco at St. Raul's on the Sunoag after Christmas, Eecemuer 29, 1S72. SERMON XX. THE NAME OF JESUS. St. LuKE-ii. 21. His Name was called Jesus, Which was so named of the angel, before He loas conceived in the womb ..... 323 iPrtacljto at St. Raul's on the feast of tlje Circumcision, Sanuaru 1, 1871. SERMON XXI. THE CIRCUMCISION OF OUR LORD. St. Luke ii. 21. Eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the Child . 341 breaches at St. Raul's on tfje feast of tijt Circumcision, Sanuarg I, ISS?. SERMON XXII. THE GUIDANCE OF THE STAR. \ St. Matt. ii. i, 2. Now when Jems was born in Bethlehem of Jud.xa in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem, saying, Where is Hejhat is born King of the Jews ? for we have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him . . 348 13rcachco at St. Paul's on tije first Sunoag after tlje ISpiptjang, Sanuarg 8, 1S71. Contents. xv SERMON XXIII. THE GLOEY OF CHRIST AT CAN A. St. John ii. n. PAGE This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and mani- fested forth His glory ...... 368 iPtearijeli at St. ^Paul's on tfje Secono Suntiao after tfje lapipfjantJ, Sanuarp. 15, 1371. SERMON XXIV. THE CONQUEST OF EVIL. Rom. xii. 21. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good . , . 387 ipreacieo at St. Raul's on tfje Ktira SunBap. after tfje lEpipfjanp, Sanuarp 22, 1871. SERMON XXV. ST. PAUL'S AND LONDON. St. Matt. v. 14. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid . . , 405 Preae(jeD at St. iPaul's on tfje ifourtb Sunoag after tfje Epipfjang, 3anuarg 29, 1871. SERMON I. THE INCREDULITY OF ST. THOMAS. (FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT: FEAST OF ST. THOMAS.) St. John xx. 25. But Thomas said unto them, Except I shall see in His Hands the print oj the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His Side, I ivill not believe. IF there is one characteristic more than another by which the Bible account of great servants of God differs from most of the biographies of good men in modern times, it is the fearless truthfulness with which the Bible describes the failings of its heroes. Generally speaking, a modern biographer is afraid to be perfectly explicit when he has to notice some less favourable side of a life and character on which he is engaged. He says to himself that his first duty is to be loyal to his subject, and that he cannot afford to play with topics which would imperil the feeling of respect or admiration which it is his object to produce. He leaves it to the critics to pick holes in the man whom he is describing ; and so he touches weaknesses or faults with a gentle or a sparing hand, and throws all his strength into the description of what is plainly excellent and admirable. Too possibly, he finds that he has defeated his real purpose after all ; A 2 The Incredulity of St. Thomas. [Serm. men say that they wanted a history and have been put off with a panegyric. But with the Bible it is otherwise ; the Bible enumerates, with a dry simplicity, the failings no less than the virtues of the Saints. The falsehood of the Patriarch Jacob ; a the murder and adultery of David, the "man after God's own heart; " b the cowardice and temporary apostasy of St. Peter ; c even the impatience, as it might seem, on one occasion, of our Lord's Blessed Virgin Mother, d — are described in the Sacred Text with- out emphasis, but also without shrinking, when they have to take their place in the order of the narrative. One only Life is there in all Holy Scripture wherein no trace of imperfection is really discoverable ; His Life, Who, though He was made sin for us, yet knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. e And thus, as Holy Scripture guides us to adore the Sin- less Manhood of the Divine Redeemer, it puts into our mouths, generation after generation, the confession in which all, without exception, must join : " All we like sheep have gone astray ; we have turned every one unto his own way ; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." J And thus it is that in to-day's Gospel 2 the great Apostle St. Thomas, who now reigns with Jesus Christ our Lord in glory, comes before us as illustrating, not a virtue, but a grave failure, and on an occasion of critical importance. That the doubt of St. Thomas was overruled, as the Church says, "to the more confirmation of the Faith," does not affect its intrinsic character; and St. Thomas is our example to-day, not as the Apostolic doubter, but as the Apostle who shows us how faith may a Gen. xxvii. 18-24. b 2 Sam. xi. 2-17 ; Acts xiii. 22. c St. Matt. xxvi. 69-74. d St. John ii. 1-4. 0 2 Cor. v. 21. f Isa. liii. 6. e Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle. I] The Incredulity of St. Thomas. 0 be reinvigorated, and doubt surmounted or dispelled. And thus in the Church's year, this Apostle's Festival fitly guards the approach to Christmas Day ; since, at the cradle of the Divine Child of Bethlehem, faith must learn, as did St. Thomas in the upper chamber, to confess the Divinity Which is veiled beneath a Human Form, and to exclaim from the heart, as it contemplates the Divine Saviour, whether in His Infancy or in His Risen Glory, " My Lord and my God ! " a I. St. Thomas, you will remember, was not with the ten Apostles on the evening of the day of the Resurrection, when Jesus risen appeared in their midst, and blessed them, and showed them His Hands and His Side. When they told Thomas of all that had taken place, he re- fused to believe, unless he himself could test the truth of their report. " Except I shall see in Christ's Hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His Side, I will not believe." And here it may be asked, first of all, What is there to object to in this declaration ? Is not this, it may be said, the language of a man who is anxious to ground his most serious convictions on a solid foundation ; who, in a matter of such urgency, will not be content with second- hand information, but insists upon contact with and personal investigation of the facts on which his faith is to rest ? May it not be argued that, by a singular anticipa- tion, Thomas has caught something of the positive spirit of the modern world ; that he is anxious, above all things, to escape illusions and to arrive at truth by experiment ; ; St. Johu xx. 3§. 4 The Incredulity of St. Thomas. [Serm. that Truth is sometimes obliged to be peremptory and exacting, if she is to be equal to herself ; aud that the fingers of Thomas, thrust not irreverently into the Wounds of the Eisen Christ, are the fitting symbol of a spirit of inquiry, 'which is not, therefore, irreligious because it is the sworn enemy of all forms of easy credulity ? This may be said, but an old answer must suffice. The declaration of Thomas, that he will not believe except he can have bodily contact with the Wounds which show that the Christ Who has risen is the very Christ Who was crucified, involves an unwarrantable demand upon the Providence of God. Why is a man to refuse to believe a fact which he had already good reasons for anticipating as very probable, and which comes to him attested by persons whom he is bound to trust, unless he can have it warranted by another and distinct form of proof? Thomas does not say that he cannot believe if he does not touch the Wounds of Christ ; he says that he shall or will not. He betrays, by the very form of his words, his consciousness of the truth, that his believing or not is, to a certain extent at any rate, in his own power ; and that he is thus mating a sort of bargain with God, and is asking for better terms than he has before him. God, he thinks, might have done more for him if he was intended to believe in the Eesurrection of Christ ; and until his demand for more evidence is satisfied, he means to withhold beliej". He sees, or thinks he sees, how much better the matter might have been ordered ; just as Naaman thought that Abana and Pharpar would wash him from his leprosy better than all the waters of Israel ; a just as the rich man in hell thought that if one from the dead went to his brethren they would repent. b And He Who prescribed the Jordan to the • 2 Kings v. :s. b St. Luke xvi. 30. I] The Incredulity of St. Thomas. 5 Syrian leper for the cure of his leprosy ; a arid the words of Moses and the Prophets to the brethren of Dives, b as furnishing sufficient incentives to repentance ; — He also ordered, by His Providence, that Thomas should hear oi Christ's Resurrection from Apostles who had seen the Risen Christ, instead of seeing Him with them. Not to accept the report of the Apostles as sufficient was to challenge the wisdom of a Divine appointment ; aud for this reason, if for no other, the unbelief of St. Thomas is implicitly censured by our Lord. It may be urged that the causes which determine con- viction are not in a man's own power ; that they belong to the world of intellectual truth, and could not be other than they are. And it may be further urged that the evidence of sight is better any day than the evidence of hearsay ; and that Thomas was right in saying that if he was to believe in his Master's Resurrection, he must not merely hear that Christ had risen, he must see Him with his eyes and feel Him with his hands. Here, it is plain, we are very nearly on the ground which was taken up by Hume, in that celebrated argu- ment against miracles which was so much discussed by our grandfathers at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century. Hume maintained that belief is founded upon and regulated by experience ; and that, while we often discover that testimony is false, we never witness a departure from the order of Nature. Therefore, Hume argues, " it is more in accordance with experience that men should deceive us when they report a miracle than that Nature should be irregular; and accordingly there is a balance of presumption against miracles so strong as to outweigh the strongest testimony in their favour." • 2 Kings v. 10. b St. Luke xvi. 31. 6 The Incredulity of St. Thomas. [Serm. This argument is from time to time reproduced, with inconsiderable variations ; and it may detain us for a few minute?, both as lying in the path of our subject, and as having an intrinsic importance besides. Hume affirms that the credibility of a fact or a state- ment must be decided by its accordance with the estab- lished order of Nature, and by this standard only. This would be true enough, if it were certain that there is no Being in existence above and beyond Nature ; if Nature really included all existing forces. But if there does exist a Being higher than what we call Nature, and indeed its Author, of Whose mind and character we have independent knowledge, then occurrences which, like miracles, are out of agreement with the order of Nature, may yet be credible, if they can be shown to agree with the known attributes and purpose of this Being. An event, whether it be natural or miraculous, at once becomes credible when a sufficient reason is assigned for it; and a sufficient reason is assigned for a miracle, when it is shown to be in harmony with the character and purpose of the Being "Who has created what we call Nature, even though it involves an inno- vation upon His usual methods of working, or, in other words, upon Nature itself. For all, then, who believe in the existence of God (and Hume himself was a serious Theist), the idea of an " order of Nature " ought not in reason to be considered sufficient to destroy the ante- cedent possibility of miracle, much less to overrule trust- worthy testimony that a miracle has been worked. Moreover, Hume's argument proves too much for his purpose. If the strongest testimony to a miracle ought to be rejected, because human testimony has sometimes deceived us, while we have never observed a failure in the order of Nature; then the testimony of our senses I] The Incredidity of St, Thomas. 7 to a miracle ought also to be rejected, because our senses, too, have, as we cannot deny, at least sometimes deceived us. In other words, we ought not to believe a miracle if we saw it worked before our eyes. If the "order of Nature," as it is called, may forbid us to trust the report of au honest eye-witness, it may forbid us to trust the report of our own eyes. But, then, if we cannot trust the witness of our senses, how do we know anything whatever about the invariability of the order of Nature itself? This very idea of a settled order of Nature is itself the product of a continuous exercise of the senses of many generations of men ; and if the senses are to be credited when they report that order which is the rule of Nature, they do not deserve less credit when they report the exception to the rule. Though they may at times give us false reports, it is upon the whole reasonable to believe them ; and in like manner, though the testimony of other men may be sometimes false, it may also be at least as trustworthy as the evidence of our own senses. Whether it is so or not in a given case must be held to depend upon the moral character of the witness, upon his oppor- tunities of observation and of apprehending and describing clearly what he sees. If he tells us that he has seen a miracle, and if his character and conduct are in keeping with the requirements of this statement, then his testi- mony proves, at any rate to begin with, the conviction of his own mind. And this conviction is itself a fact which must be explained in some way or other ; and if it can be accounted for in no other way than by supposing that the alleged miracle was real, then it is not merely reasonable, but necessary in reason, to believe the miracle upon testi- mony, the claims of the " order of Nature " notwith- standing. And this brings us to St. Thomas, protesting to the 8 The Incredulity of St. Thomas. [Seem. disciples who had seen Jesus Risen that he would not believe the Resurrection till he had seen and touched the Risen Redeemer. Why should he refuse credence to the report of his colleagues? St. Thomas certainly would not have held that there was any order of Nature which could bar the possibility of miracle, since he believed in an Omnipotent and Living God, and would not have shrunk, like the Deists of the last century, from what is involved in this belief. But he would not believe the startling report that his Crucified Master had left His grave ; not because the Resurrection was a momentous miracle, but because he could not take it from others upon trust. And yet there were not wanting grave reasons for his believing the ten Apostles, the two disciples, and the three women who said that they had seen the Lord. Had not Christ said that He would rise from the dead? Had He not appealed to the old Jewish Scriptures, and given His Resurrection as a sign of the truth of His mission ? If a miracle was ever to be looked for, was it not to be expected here? If God, Who had made the order of Nature so generally invariable, might be expected to interfere with it for the highest of all purposes that we can conceive — this, surely, was an occasion for His doing so. Had Thomas enjoyed those months, and even years, of close companionship with Jesus without perceiving in Him that which, to say the very least, might warrant on His behalf, and on behalf of His cause and work, interference with the accustomed laws of God in Nature? And was it reasonable or reverent summarily to reject the assurance of his brethren that such an interference had taken place ? It may, indeed, be asked why Thomas should not have been permitted to see Jesus Christ after His Resurrection, as the other Apostles saw Him ; had he done so, no ques- J] The Incredulity of St. Thomas. 9 tion would have been raised, no hesitation experienced. In like manner men ask why the evidence for Christianity- is not greater tlian it is ; why it is not, as some would say, so compulsory and overwhelming that the mind cannot set it aside without conscious absurdity. The truth is that the evidence for religion is just what it is and no more, in order to satisfy reason, rightly informed and disciplined, and yet to leave room for faith. If we could not help believing in Christianity there would be no occasion for faith ; we should accept the Creed by exactly the same act of the mind as that by which we accept the conclusion of a problem in Euclid. As reasonable beings, we should have no choice about it ; and our faith would imply nothing whatever as to the condition of our affections or characters. God has made the evidence for Christianity less than mathematical, because He desires to make faith a test, not only of the soundness of our understandings, but also and especially of the condition of our hearts and wills. These clo contri- bute to the complex act of faith, while they have nothing to do with an act of pure reason. " With the heart man believeth unto righteousness." 1 It is because faith is thus a criterion of the state of our affections, and of the direction and straightforwardness of our wills, that it is represented in the New Testament as being a cause of our justification before God. b It could have nothing to do with our justification if it were only a necessary act of the understanding ; but because it is much more than this ; because it belongs to conduct as much as to thought ; therefore the evidence for Christianity is of such a cha- racter — sufficient, yet not compulsory — as to allow for the play of those moral dispositions which, combined with the understanding, enable a man to say, " I believe." " Rom. x. io. b lb. iii. 28, 30; iv. 1S-25. io The Incredulity of St. Thomas. [Serm. II. But if the unbelief of St. Thomas is instructive, his faith is still more instructive. When Thomas laid down conditions under which alone belief in his Eisen Saviour would be possible, our Lord was pleased, in His love and condescension, to take the Apostle at his word. A week after the day of the Resurrection, Jesus appeared among the assembled Apostles, when Thomas was with them. Thomas had said, "I will not believe." Now he saw. He saw that Form, those Features on which he had gazed in bygone times with such reverent love; he heard that Voice, with whose accents he was so familiar, and which lie had for the moment deemed silent for ever in the grave ; and he was thrilled, we may be sure, through and through. To have seen his Eisen Master at all would have been overwhelming ; to have seen Him after deny- ing that He was risen, after resisting the witness borne by others that He had kept His promise, — this must have passed all word and thought. And when, instead of reproaching Thomas, Jesus accepted his terms, and bade him " reach forward thy finger, and behold My Hands ; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into My Side : and be not faithless, but believing," a what an agony of confusion and self-reproach must not have taken possession of the Apostle's soul ! Thomas might have resisted even yet ; conviction was not forced on him : had his will been set on resistance, there were at hand ingenious reasons for resisting. But, in truth, the sight of Jesus was enough; he had no heart to hold out against the Presence and appeal of the Most Merciful. He did not reach out his fingers towards the * St. John xx. 27. The Incredulity of St. Thomas. 1 1 Hands and Side of Jesus. But as there was now no room for faith, properly speaking, in the Eesurrection of the Body of Jesus from the grave, since the Risen Jesus was before his eves, his faith embraced the Divine Person Who was veiled beneath the Human Form before him, and he cried in a transport of adoration, " My Lord and my God ! " We may have known men who, in Thomas s place, would have acted otherwise. For a return to faith is often rendered difficult, if not impossible, by a subtle form of pride. It is not the coarse self-assertion which outrages good taste, if it does not shock the moral sense, but the quiet vice which mimics a healthy self-respect, and which actually led the Jews to reject Jesus Christ, that is the foe of reviving faith. For such pride aims commonly at two objects ; personal distinction, and freedom from public criticism. A believer, as such, can hardly be very distinguished; his faith places him on a level with millions who share it ; with poor, simple folk who make no pretension to being wiser than their neighbours, still less wiser than the Bible, or than the Church. But an unbeliever may imagine himself, I do not say with what justice, to see a great deal further than the mass of people around him; he piques himself on being superior to their prejudices, and on living in higher spheres of thought. And therefore, when Christianity, as God's message to the human race, visibly commends itself to multitudes of men, that is a reason with hini for reject- ing it. And if he has already rejected it, this reason becomes very strong indeed: the conceit of singularity is reinforced by the pride of consistency. If he returns to faith, he will have to admit to himself and to others that he was wrong in rejecting it ; wrong in supposing himself to be more far-sighted than others. This admission costs I 2 The Incredulity of St. Thomas. [Serm. hioi too much. Thomas certainly had to own to himself that the demand to see and touch the Wounds of Christ was unwarrantable. But in that Sacred Presence there was no room for self, and he surrendered at discretion. Much more do grosser vices hold back the soul from a return to faith. A man who is yielding to them willingly cannot afford to treat the evidence for Christianity witli intellectual justice. The Gospel reproves and condemns him ; it makes bitter his cup of pleasure ; he has no part in its promises; he cannot mistake the import of its warnings. He has, therefore, a strong motive for wishing it to be untrue. In these matters the will gene- rally contrives to make the understanding do its good pleasure ; so that infidel reasoning, which affects to be a disinterested effort of intelligence, is sometimes really prompted by desires that have nothing whatever to do with intelligence. Besides this, vicious habits blunt the spiritual perceptions of the soul ; they eat out its finer sensibilities ; they are fatal to its capacity for seeing moral beauty ; and this puts out of reach one of the most striking of the Christian evidences ; that which is based on the perfection of our Lord's Human Character. And thus men have come to regard the most tender and attractive mysteries of the Christian Creed with some- thing like disgust, and they catch eagerly at misrepre- sentations of its import ; they welcome objections to the reasons by which it is defended, and even repeat jests at its expense. Into such a soul, we are told, "Wisdom will not enter, nor dwell in a body that is subject unto sin." a No such motive would have kept St. Thomas in unbelief : but it is too common to be overlooked in our own day. There are, of course, other causes which may keep men a Wisd. i. 4. I] The Incredulity of St. Thomas. 1 3 back from faith ; causes for which God, in His Justice and His Mercy, will make, we may be sure, due allowance. Such are an unhappy education, perhaps by unbelieving parents or guardians, or intimacy with unbelievers of great mental ability, or a constitutional frivolity of judg- ment, and not unfrequently, though this is little suspected, a morbidly active imagination which cannot acquiesce in the idea of fixed and unalterable truth. I^ot least among these causes, too, is unconscious ignorance. Men who reject Christianity often do not know what the case for it really is. They have been familiar with Christian language, with the language of the Bible, it may be, for years ; and they mistake this familiarity for real knowledge. They do not reflect upon it, so as to see its harmonies, its ample moral justification, its depths beyond depths of interconnected truth. Living as they do upon the surface, they are impressed by apparent difficulties about it; they ask to put their hands into the print of the nails if they are to receive it. He Who stood before Thomas waits to appear, by His grace, in the centre of their souls. But whether they will adore Him if He does is an anxious question. Doubt of the truth of Christianity is more common now than it was twenty-five years ago ; and there are writers and speakers who would fain persuade themselves and others that, far from being a misfortune, such doubt is a healthy and interesting condition of mind. We often hear quoted these lines of the Laureate — " There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds." Doubt is treated as a symptom of intellectual activity, while faith is assumed to mean stagnation ; doubt is described as mental life, faith almost as mental death; 14 The Incredulity of St. Thomas. [Serm. doubt is the herald of progress, faith the symptom of uninquiring adherence to the errors of the past. My friends, this is not the language of whatever is best and most thoughtful among us. In the early years of manhood, when spirits are buoyant and health is unimpaired, when as yet no dark shadow has fallen across the path of life, and the sun shines so brightly that it seems as if it might shine on for ever, it is possible to sing in these lyrical strains the apotheosis of doubt. But pass a few years of life, till the first great gap has been made by death in the home circle, and the first great heartache has settled on the soul ; till some sharp shock of illness has laid bare the frailty of the tenure by which we hold to life, and has opened before the mind's eye the illimitable vistas of that eternity which lies beyond the tomb. Ask yourselves then, whether it is better that the hand which lays hold on the Unseen, on the promises of the Eternal God, on the work of the Crucified, on the grace of His Spirit and His Sacraments, should quiver and tremble, than that it should grasp its Object with a firm and unyielding hold. No, brethren, doubt is not health, it is disease; it is not strength, it is weakness. It is moral weakness, and it is religious weakness. Moral weakness, because it shivers or paralyzes those great convictions which impel men to act virtuously, and which sustain them during the stress and pain of action. No man acts with decision upon a motive which one half of his mind accepts, while the other questions or rejects it. As St. James says, a man with two souls or minds is unstable in all his ways. a He cannot make up his mind, for he has no one mind to make up. And while he is balancing helplessly between the conflicting views which in their » St. James i. 8. The Incredulity of St. Thomas. 1 5 equipoise produce the doubt, the time for decisive action passes, and nothing has been done. Doubt is moral weakness, tben ; but much more is it religious weakness! Eeligion is only possible when the soul lays hold upon One on Whom it depends, and to Whom it is, and feels itself to be, bound by the double tie of love and submission. But when the soul's grasp of the Perfect Being is weakened, loosened, if not forfeited, by doubt, then Religion correspondingly dies away, and the soul sinks down from the high contemplation of what is above it, into the embraces of that material world which awaits its fall, in order to complete its degradation. Faith, believe me, is the leverage of our nature; and doubt shatters the lever. Do not let us waste compliments upon what is, after all, only the disease and weakness of our mental constitution ; like those savages who make a fetish of the animals or reptiles from whose ravages they suffer. Let us resist, let us conquer it. And if we quote those lines of the Laureate already referred to, and which are not altogether free from a touch of paradox, let us remember that his hero, if he passed through the pain of doubt, yet " Fought his doubts and gathered strength : He would not make his judgment blind; He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came atlmgth " To find a stronger faith his own." a As you leave this Cathedral, you would have seen, in the North-West Chapel, if the light had sufficed, a painted window which represents the subject of to-day ; the In- credulity of St. Thomas. That window has been erected within the last year to the memory of the late Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. Mansel ; and, as it has seemed to me, n In Manoyiam. 1 6 The Incredulity of St. Thomas. [Sekm. Deau Mansel claims a special place in the thoughts and prayers of those who knelt beside hini of old, in this his Cathedral, on St. Thomas's Day. Each of us has his appointed work in life and in the Church of God ; and the achievement by which Dean Mansel is best known to the educated world is his application of the principles of the so-termed Philosophy of the Unconditioned to the solution of some difficulties supposed to lie against the claims of Eevelation. That particular enterprise, brilliant as it was, roused at the time a storm of con- troversy, and the discussions to which it gave rise have not yet died away; nor, indeed, considering the en- during interest of the subject for serious thinkers, are they likely to do so. But his greatest work was wider than this, and, we may dare to say, of more certaiu and absolute value. No man probably in this generation had explored more perfectly the capacities of the human mind, considered as a reasoning instrument, than our late Dean ; no man certainly knew better how to turn it to account ; as we read him, there is a combination of strength and delicacy in his method of handling abstract argument which marks one of the princes of the world of thought. And yet the truth which he felt most keenly, and which he laboured in a hundred ways to impress upon others around him, was the very limited range of our mental powers M'hen dealing with the vast subjects that surround us ; with the heights and depths, the immeasurable and eternal things which form the subject-matter of Religion. He had no patience as a reasoner with the preposterous demands for unattainable kinds of proof in those awful regions, or with the puny and self-confident logic which essays to scale and storm the Throne of Christ, only because it has not yet discovered the measure of its own prowess. And thus he himself could enter the courts of The Incredulity of St. Thomas. i 7 the Kingdom of Heaven, because he had learnt that the temper of a little child was not less dictated by right reason than by religion. Eight years have passed since he was laid in his grave ; since he entered into that life where no duty is assigned to faith because souls gaze incessantly on faith's Everlasting Object. One by one, each in his turn, we shall follow him ; and hereafter, per- haps, in that unending world, some of us will bless the Giver of all good gifts for His servant's work in showing us, during this our earthly pilgrimage, that "they who have not seen, and yet have believed," have learnt what is due to a true estimate of the powers of man's reason, as well as to the authority of the Voice of God. SERMON II. THE REVELATION TO ST. THOMAS. (FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT: FEAST OF ST. THOMAS.) St. John xiv. 5, 6. Thomas saith unto Him, Lord, we know not whither Thou cjoest; and hoio can we hnoio the way ? Jesus saith unto him, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life : no man cometh tmto the Father, but by Me. HT. THOMAS is chiefly remembered for the part he 0 played in that memorable scene after the Resurrec- tion of our Lord, which is described in to-day's Gospel. His unbelief, or rather his deliberate suspension of assent to the truth which was before him, except upon certain narrow conditions which he laid down, led to a verification of our Lord's Resurrection, and to a confession of His true Divinity, in some respects more emphatic than any other in the Gospels. And in the same way the Apostle's question in the passage before us was followed by a most memorable result. St. Thomas seems to have been, by the temper of his mind, hesitating, reserved, critical ; disposed to see difficulties, to ask for explanations, to require more proof when others acquiesced. It will be iu your recollection that our Lord had begun His last dis- course in the supper-room by dwelling on His approach- ing departure from the world. The disciples were not to be troubled at it. If they believed in Goil, they wonld The Revelation to St. Thomas. 19 also believe in Jesus Christ ; and if He is leaving them, He tells them it was that He might prepare a place for them among the many mansions of the Father's House. Then He would return ; whether by some great spiritual visitation, or in some catastrophe like the destruction of Jerusalem, or in that world-embracing event of which it was an anticipatory shadow. He would come again and receive them to Himself, that where He was they might be also. Meanwhile, the disciples knew at least the direc- tion in which He was moving ; and this knowledge would reassure their troubled hearts. " Whither I go " — these were His exact words — " whither I go, ye know the way." a It is at this point that St. Thomas bursts in somewhat abruptly with his objection : " Lord, we know not whither Thou goest ; and how can we know the way ? " The language of our Lord about the purpose of His departure, which says so much to us, which brings our Father's House and its many mansions so vividly before us, had left no strong or distinct impression on the minds of men who were still on the threshold of faith, and to whom spiritual things were new. Our Lord seemed to be speak- ing of a work, while they were thinking of a place. And if they did not know to what place He was going, how could they know the way to it ? In natural things this reasoning is cogent. Thomas did but express the obvious and superficial criticism upon a statement which could only be understood in the light of a higher truth than he had yet grasped. Probably a human teacher would have answered St. Thomas somewhat as follows : " I have already told you enough about the p\irpose of my departure to enable you to understand the direction which I must take. Your n Cf. St. John xiv. 4. The second koI and mSare in the Received Text represent an attempt to explain this condensed saying, by expanding it. 20 The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Serm. knowledge of the way does not depend so entirely as you may think upon an exact idea of the goal to which I am moving. You may well wait for further knowledge, since you know enough for present purposes, whether of conso- lation or of duty." This would have been an answer sufficient in itself, and, as we may perhaps think, wholesome for a person in St. Thomas's state of mind. But our Lord, as was often His manner, especially as He is reported by the fourth Evan- gelist, did not answer the question ; or, at least, He did not answer it directly. He seems to have looked at it, not as a question to be answered, but as affording an occasion for proclaiming a wider, grander, more compre- hensive truth than was needed in order to answer it The question is left on one side; it is only answered incidentally. Our Lord, before speaking again, would seem to have moved beyond the narrower issue which the question raises into a wider and sublimer field of contemplation, which is the subject of His next utterance. Jesus saith unto him, " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." We may well be grateful to St. Thomas for eliciting this splendid revelation ; and we shall not be wanting to the claims of his festival if we proceed to consider it somewhat in detail. I. Our Lord begins, " I am the Way." He is, of course, thinking of His own words, " Whither I go, ye know the way ; " and of St. Thomas's question, " How can we know the way ? " But while repeating the word " way," He gives it a new netting. Instead of saying, "I will show you the way," He says, "I am the Way." As we think over His words, we feel that, in this The Revelation to St. Thomas. 2 1 new and higher association, the word has groAvn sensibly in scope and meaning. The employment of the figure of a way, or path, to describe the successive phases of human thought or con- duct, the invisible track along which the spirit of man moves between birth and death, was more natural to the ancient world than it is to the modern. Before the Roman civilization, there were scarcely any carefully constructed public roads. Men journeyed from place to place as best they might, without the guidance of a settled track; they watched the heavens, or they noted any traces they could of former travellers across the Eastern deserts, or through the forests and mountains of the West. In those early days, and for long after, the metaphor was too natural and too welcome not to be generally employed to describe any system of moral or religious guidance. Thus, to go no further, the later Stoics, and some Chinese mystics, and the Mohammedan Coran, each recommend a " way ; " although, in the last instance, the word is un- doubtedly borrowed from the Jewish and Christian Scrip- tures. In the religious language of the Jews, it meant the path which a soul should follow in order to reach the true goal of its destiny ; in order to be conformed to the Will of God. Thus the Psalmist speaks of "the way of the righteous," a " the right way," b " the way of God's precepts," 0 " the way of God's commandments," d " the way of God's statutes," e " the way of truth," f " the way wherein I should walk," g " the perfect way ; " h and the Book of Proverbs of " the way of life ; " 1 and Isaiah of "the way of the just," j " the way of holiness," k "the way of peace ; " 1 and Jeremiah of " the good way," m " the one ■ Ps. i. 7. b lb. ii. 12. c lb. cxix. 27. d lb. 32. 0 lb. 33. ( lb. 30. e lb. cxliii. 8. h lb. ci. 2. 1 Frov. vi. 23. ' Isa. xxvi. 7. k lb. xxxv. 8. 1 lb. lix. 8. ■ Jer. vi. 16. 22 The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Seem. •n ay," a " the way to Zion," b " the way which God would show ; " c and Amos of " the way of the meek ; " d and Malachi of "the way that the forerunner should pre- pare ; " e and Zacharias of " the way of peace," into which " the Day-star from on high " would " guide our feet." £ But of all the many passages in which the word occurs, perhaps the most vivid is that which closes the First Lesson for this afternoon's ° service, in which Isaiah, looking through and beyond historical events in a nearer future, predicts the faith and discipline of the Christian Church as a rule of life for redeemed humanity : — " And an highway shall be there, And a way, And it shall be called The way of holiness ; The unclean shall not pass over it ; But it shall be for those : The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, Nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, It shall not be found there ; But the redeemed shall walk there : And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, And come to Zion with songs, And everlasting joy shall be upon their heads : They shall obtain joy and gladness, And soitow and sighing shall flee away." h Thus the expression, " the way," had a fixed and well understood religious meaning. It meant a path uniting two worlds, the seen with the unseen, earth with Heaven traversing regions through which, without such guidance the thought and heart of man could not safely penetrate and having definite characteristics of its own. The fiirure at once sus;2;ested the associations of righteous 0 Jer. xxxii. 39. b lb. L 5. c lb. xlii. 3. d Amos ii. 7. 0 Mai. iii. 1. f St. Luke i. 79. b The Festival of St. Thomas. h Isa. xxxv. S-10. II] The Revelation to St. Thomas. -3 ness, peace, God's commands, God's Will, and the like ; so that when " the way " was spoken of every one knew what it meant. And thus we find that, after the Day of Pente- cost, when the Christian Church and Eeligion were abroad in the world, the name was constantly applied to Chris- tianity, the Apostolic faith and life. " I persecuted this way unto the death," a says St. Paul, when describing his unconverted life ; of his later years he professes that "after the way that the Jews call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers." b When Aquila and Priscilla completed the Christian education of A polios, they are said to have " expounded to him the way of God more perfectly." c The anti- Christian demonstrations in the amphitheatre at Ephesus are described as "no small stir about that way." 11 When Felix's unwillingness to hear St. Paul's more direct appeal to his conscience is accounted for, we are told that he already knew a great deal about the Christian Creed ; he " had a more perfect knowledge of that way." e "The way," then, in our Lord's mouth, meant that disposition of the mind and heart and will of man by which man attains to the true end of his being. St. Thomas was right in thinking that " way " and " end " are, in some sense, correlative terms ; that the one implies the other ; that some notion of the end before us, although not necessarily a local one, is necessary to our knowing the way. What is the end to which our Lord proclaims Himself the Way ? If eighteen centuries ago we could have walked up and down the streets of Kome, the great capital of the world, and have cross-questioned the human beings whom we should have met respecting the objects for which • Actsxxii. 4. b lb. xxiv. 14. c lb. xviii. 26. d lb. xix. 23. 0 lb. xxiv. 22. 24 The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Serm. they were spending thought, heart, resolution, life itself ; what would have been the answer ? We know only too well from their own literature. They would have named power, influence, knowledge, reputation, fortune, success, enjoyment. For these things they prayed to deities who were the reflections of their own passions. About these things they talked and wrote and quarrelled, with- out a suspicion that they were not doing the best they could with life. And towards each of these ends there was many a way ; tortuous, slippery, rough, facile, as the case might be. And if any had whispered that there was something better to be done with life ; that no end which perishes with death can be adequate unless we can be sure that all end3 at death ; that to make the best of life in this lower and material sense, is to fall below the ideal which man's own heart and conscience, when cross-questioned, would suggest ; — those old Eomans would have gently shrugged their shoulders, and smiled at the simple enthusiasm which could really imperil present, substantial, and visible comforts for an object so transcendental, so uncertain, so fugitive. But let us, in passing, ask ourselves, Is it certain that the objects which they thus held to be worthy ends of life were wholly unlike those of many a modern Londoner? The phrases in which the estimate might be stated would doubtless differ. But would not the pith and substance of the estimate be much the same ? Now, this general conception of the object of life is again and again condemned by our Lord Jesus Christ. According to Him, this world is to be used simply with a view to the next ; it is to be renounced, if need be, alto- gether for the sake of the next. He nowhere promises to His followers wealth, or reputation, or social power, or present amusement. He blesses those who give up father The Revelation to St. Thomas. 25 and mother, and wife and children, for His sake. a He at least glances at the pagan conceptions of a present, material object and end of thought and effort when He says, " He that loveth His life shall lose it." b The end which our Lord had in view, and to which He is " the Way," is described sometimes, as in the context of this passage, as a "coming to the Father;" sometimes as a "finding" or "entering" "the Kingdom of Heaven," 0 or " the Kingdom of God." d This Kingdom, as we know, was to begin in time ; it was to reach on into eternity. It was to be founded on earth, and was to be expanded, perfected, and consolidated in Heaven. It was to be set up in the individual soul, but it was also to be the temper and rule of a great society ; spread throughout the invisible as well as the visible world. It was to be the reign of the One Perfect Being ; the control of human life, in its various relations, by that moral law which is, in its essence, His Nature; the conquest and mortification of desire in all its lower and selfish forms ; the subdual of concupiscence, of pride, of self-assertion; the establishment of love between man and man as a controlling principle of inter- course; the reign of harmony alike in this great con- federation of souls and in each of its constituent members ; of a harmony to be achieved when human minds should possess and obey the truth, and human affections be centred on the Eternal Beauty, and human wills freely submitted to the Perfect and Eternal Law. This is the ideal which our Lord set before men as their true end. Even in its degradation and weakness the human conscience could not but acknowledge its fascina- tion. But how was such an end to be reached ? That question is answered by the saying, " I am the Way." a St. Matt. xix. 29. 6 St. John xii. 25. c St. Matt. v. 20; vii. 21 ; xiii. 45, 46. d St. Luke iv. 43 ; St. .Mm iii. 5. 26 The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Seem. As though He would say, " The road you seek, that it may bring you to the Father and to the Kingdom, is not like the milky way traced by imagination across the material heavens ; since in the moral and spiritual world space has no existence. I am the Way. In My life and teaching you already see the road which leads to the Father and the Kingdom. The Father may be reached and the Kingdom entered even here. My Human Nature is consecrated as a new and living way a into the Presence- chamber of the Holiest ; and no other way than this is open to you. No man cometh to the Father but by Me. I am the Way." n. But our Lord goes further. He says, " I am the Truth." Let us observe what He does not say. He does not say, "I teach the truth." All teachers would at least wish to say that. He does not say, " I am the greatest teacher of truth that the world has seen." That would have been true ; but it would have fallen short, almost infinitely short, of the reality. He does say, "I am the Truth." We cannot overrate the significance of this saying. It altogether does away, in our Lord's case, with the distinction which we find in the case of all others who have taught mankind, between the teacher and his message. Look at those instructors of our modern world — Bacon, Newton, Butler ; their message is entirely independent of themselves. If we knew nothing what- ever about these men, the value of their several contri- butions to the knowledge and thought of the world would be quite unaffected by our ignorance. What they tell ns " Heb. x. 20. The Revelation to St. Thomas. 2 7 has an independent value of its own. This value lasts when the lips that have taught it have mouldered into dust ; when the true outline of their lives is known perhaps only to a few students. In like manner, the teaching of a Prophet or an Apostle has a value distinct from the person of its author; and some of the most beautiful things in Christendom are of uncertain authorship. The controversies about the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, or of the Athanasian Creed, or of the Imitation of Christ, do not affect our estimate of the intrinsic value of these compositions. It is otherwise with our Lord. His message is bound up indissolubly with His Person ; nay, He is His own Message to the world. His language is intolerable or meaningless unless there exists such a Person as He proclaims Himself to be, and unless He is that Person. In short, Christ is Christianity. Therefore He could say, not only " I teach the Truth," but " I am the Truth." " I am the Truth." All that is true in human thought, all that is true in the world of fact, meets in Jesus Christ. Among other teachers truth is partially apprehended and taught, or it is mingled with error. Plato uttered many sublime things about man, about life, about virtue, together with many absurdities or worse. Moses taught, under Divine guidance, many truths about Almighty God ; but, as we Christians know, they were unbalanced, incomplete truths. All the rays of truth, scattered through false or imperfect systems, meet as in a focus in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ are "all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." a And if He sometimes teaches men only such truth as they are able to bear, He makes them feel that He has in reserve everything to teach, if only they could bear the lesson. b 0 Col. ii. 3. <> St. John xvi. 12. 28 The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Seem. Observe one consequence of this. There can be no real contradiction between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and any ascertained fact of nature, or any certain postulate or truth of thought. There may be apparent contradiction ; in other words, we, with our limited faculties, or in our present circumstances, may not see how harmony is pos- sible here or there. And there may be real and utter contradiction between the Gospel and the hypotheses, deductions, theories, which human minds have spun out from the facts of nature or from the first principles of thought. But between truth and fact, or truth and truth, there can be no real contradiction. And if we do not see how reconciliation is possible, we must believe that this does not show that reconciliation is impossible ; we must be patient, and light will surely come. " I am the Truth." In Jesus Christ we recognize not merely relative, but absolute Truth. Kemark the impor- tance of this distinction. Much of the truth which we encounter in life is relative; relative to the age we live in, relative to the country of our birth, relative to the type of society and civilization around us, relative to the history of our own minds and characters. Nations out- grow some truths which were truths to them in the early centuries of their existence ; men outgrow truths which were truths to them in childhood and boyhood. Doubt- less we can verify this, each for himself, in our own ex- perience. The books we read with most enjoyment, the minds with which we most delighted to be in contact, the thoughts, the fancies, the enthusiasms of younger days, are no longer to us what they were. We linger over them, il is true, but less on account of their intrinsic worth than from delight in the associations which they recall. But some truths there are which are as true to us now as they were then. The profound distinction between right and II] The Revelation to St. Thomas. 29 wrong, the sacredness of fact in small matters as in great, the power and beauty of unselfishness, — these are as true to the man at seventy as they were to the boy at seven. And to this order of truths our Lord and Saviour — all that He teaches and all that He is — claims to belong, and does belong. " He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever;" 3 not relative to a particular state of mind, but ever and for all the same. He is the Absolute Truth. "I am the Truth." A truth in ordinary language im- plies two things between which it is an exact relation. What is a true history ? A history which corresponds exactly to the facts which are described. What is a true scientific statement ? A statement which exactly expresses the law which governs such and such natural occurrences. What is a political truth ? A tenet or doctrine in politics which does real justice to the true needs of the greatest number of human beings. When we speak of anything as true, we think of something else with which it corre- sponds, whether it be a fact, or a law, or an ideal. What, then, do we mean by a true religion ? We mean a reli- gion which expresses and insists on those relations between man and God which are really perfect and harmonious. And when Jesus Christ our Lord said, " I am the Truth," He meant not only that He taught us what those relations are, but that He realized them in His own Person He is, in His twofold Nature as God and Man, the meeting- point between the Divine and the Human. He is the bridge between earth and Heaven. Others before and since Jesus Christ have taught men much, with varying success, about God and about man ; such lessons as might be learnt by continuous observation and reflection upon nature, upon conscience, upon wide experience and introspection of human character. But « Heb. xiii. 8. 3o The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Serm. all such teaching, even at its best, differs vitally from that which was taught, or rather achieved, by Jesus Christ. He does not simply or mainly teach religion ; He lives it. As He acts, as He suffers, in every movement of His earthly Life, we see man at perfect peace with God ; we behold God absolutely controlling, inspiring, pene- trating man. If we desire to know what God is in His Essential Attributes, we need but study Jesus Christ. " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." a The knowledge of the glory of God is flashed forth from the Face of Jesus Christ. b Jesus Christ leaves us in no doubt as to whether God understands us, loves us, wills to save us or not. He leaves us in no doubt as to whether man may know God, love God, be one with God in the intimacy of a union which is the ideal goal of religion. It was with reference to religion that Jesus Christ said, " I am the Truth." The human soul was wearied with abstract dissertations on the awful, abstract, inac- cessible Being, on the aspirations, capacities, failures of man. Jesus Christ appeared, and, for all who had eyes to see, controversy ceased. His Life proclaimed, no less clearly than His Lips, that in finding Him they had found One Who could indeed say, " I am the Truth." III. At last we reach the climax. Our Lord says, " I am the Life." We have lately c had occasion to consider the nature of mystery. A mystery is a fact the existence of which is certain, but the compass of which is, at least partially, hidden from us. We saw that such facts, so far from a St. John xiv. 9. b 2 Cor. iv. 6. c See Advent in St. Paul's, vol. ii. serm. xliii. The Revelation to St. Thomas. 3 1 being distinctive characteristics of revealed religion, are abundantly discoverable in the realm of Nature. Now, of such partially hidden facts or mysteries, not the least is life. As we watch ourselves, as we look out upon nature, we know that life is there. But what in itself life is, we do not know. No combination of atoms that has yet been imagined cau account for its appearance ; no account of its essence or origin that will bear discussion has yet been put forward by those who would ignore the presence and action of God in this His universe. We hear, indeed, of a philo- sophy of the unconscious ; but sonorous phrases will not surmount the difficulty of explaining how, at a certain moment, a particle of dead matter could transform itself into a living cell, or how a group of these living cells could, unaided, arrive at feeling, at consciousness, at self- comprehending, self-analyzing, reflective thought. Life, indeed, is a hierarchy with many grades of dignity ; it reaches from the humblest lichen on the stone beneath our feet up to the strongest aud most beautiful of the intelligences around the Throne. But who shall say what in itself it is, or whence it is, unless it be the gift of One Who, as His Name implies, lives of Himself and eternally, and from Whom it derives that attribute of mystery which shrouds its true nature from our gaze ? Side by side with life, we see everywhere around us its rival, death ; and if physical death has other aspects, it is closely connected, at any rate, with moral death. " By one man sin came into the world, and death by sin." 8 The world, as it exists around us, is clearly not now the best of possible worlds. It bears traces of the ravages of some destructive force; it is strewed with ruins. The agencies which are often most active, and which surround life with a thousand seductions, are really ministers of death ; " Rom. v. 12. 32 The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Seem. they carry death and decomposition in the folds of their robes as they move through the corridors of time. If they could speak with perfect unreserve and conscientious- ness, they would say to mankind, one after another, "I am a minister of death." But Jesus Christ could say, " I am the Life." All derived life, the lowest and the highest, the life of the lichen and the life of the Arch- angel, meet in and are derived from Him — the Eternal Word, the Only Begotten Son, "by Whom all things were made," a and Who came among us that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly. b For as the Father hath life in Himself, so from all eternity hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself; 0 and if God has given unto us Christians eternal life, it is because that life is in His Son. d Life manifests its presence by movement and growth ; and we read one aspect of the truth of the words, " I am the Life," in the general aspect of Christendom, as compared with the non-Christian world. Making all allowance for the failure of the Christian peoples to be true to the Gospel and Spirit of Christ, and, in modern times, for efforts to " break asunder the bonds " of Christian dis- cipline, and " cast away its cords " e from human life, it remains true that Christian civilization has in it a power and a promise undiscoverable elsewhere ; that where Christ is at work in the convictions and consciences of men, there is a hopefulness, an effort after improvement, a power to resist social decomposition, and to inaugurate true social progress, which we look for in vain where He is unknown or forgotten. It is sufficient to compare those Eastern nations in which, since the fifteenth century, Christians have formed at best a small minority of the * The Xicene Creed ; cf. Heb. i. 2. b St. John x. 10. 0 lb. v. 26. d 1 St. John v. ii a c Pa. ii. 3. II] The Revelation to St. Thomas. 33 population, with the European peoples among whom Christianity has continuously been in the ascendant. The very idea of progress is a creation of Christianity, acting on the facts of social life. And those who own no allegiance to our Lord, confess that the best hopes of the world are bound up with races and nations that have been purified and invigorated by His Life. But if our Lord is the Life of nations, it is because He is, first of all, the Life of individual souls. Christian principles act upon human society not as an influence from without, but as a leaven from within. Christianity, as a renovating power, spreads not from the multitude to the individual, but from the individual to the multi- tude. So it was at the first ; so it is now. Whenever some few hearts and minds are thoroughly penetrated by the Life which is in Jesus Christ, the Divine contagion extends to other souls around them. There has often been a temptation to ignore this truth ; to imagine a shorter and easier way to the improvement of the world through the vague influence of some social movement or enthusiasm upon large masses of men ; no account being taken of man's individual relations to the Divine Redeemer. Our Lord's own example is decisive. Though He was the Saviour of the world, He dealt with single souls, as if each one for the moment absorbed His entire attention. Consider only His dealings with Nicodemus, with the woman of Samaria, with St. Mary Magdalene. " When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren," 11 is a saying which reveals His method ; and it is a method not for His day only, but for all time. And this is the true meaning of the Christian Sacraments; a meaning too often lost sight of in popular but imperfect systems of Christianity. They are the revealed means of our being a St. Luke xxii. 32. O 34 The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Serm. brought into contact one by one with the Life that re- sides in the Redeemer. " As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ." a " He that eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood hath eternal life." b " I am the Life." This is the crowning revelation of Himself which our Lord here makes to the soul of man. He does not merely show us a road or reveal a truth ; He offers the inward vital power without which we cannot to any purpose follow the one or grasp the other. Know- ledge by itself, though it be the very highest, cannot save men. We are slowly unlearning the superstition, which has had such fatal currency in this century, that to be well-informed is necessarily to be honest, industrious, pure, or even greater things than these. Alas ! a man may spend his life in dissecting the very words of Christ, or the inmost convictions and feelings of Christian souls, and himself remain untouched, unimproved, dead. It is only when He Who is the Life makes the heart and will of man indeed His own, touches those secret springs at which the great issues of our existence are really deter- mined, that the last and greatest of these words of Jesus Christ can be really understood — " I am the Life." Let me make two remarks in conclusion. It has been said that nowhere in the Gospel does Jesus Christ say in so many words, " I am God ; " and much stress is laid upon this circumstance, as if it went to show that in His own consciousness He did not claim to be Divine. If any man should be disposed to attach weight to this observa- tion, let him consider not only the sayings of our Lord which assert His oneness 0 with the Father, and His Pre- existent Life, d but also and especially the import of the words before us. How should we listen to such words a Gal. iii. 27. h St. John vi. 54. c lb. x. 30. d lb. viii. 58. II] The Revelation to St. Thomas. 35 as these, if they were uttered by the best and wisest man whom we have ever known in life ? Let us think, each of us, of such an one ; perhaps of the trusted friend of our early years, whose character has seemed to develop new beauties as we have known him better, whose thoughts were better worth sharing, and whose heart was more tender, and whose will was more inflexible, as it seemed to us, than that of any other human being whom we have known. Put such a person, if you can, vividly before you, at the moments which you associate with his most striking manifestations of good- ness ; at some time when, perhaps, death had cast its shadow across his path, and everything was even more than commonly solemnized, purified, etherealized, by the felt nearness of the world to come. And then conceive him, if you can, as saying, " I am the way, the truth, and the life." You cannot conceive it. Your difficulty of doing so increases in the exact ratio of your belief in his goodness, his reasonableness, his humility, his power of taking a true measure of himself and of those around him. You can understand a Roman Caesar, degraded by indul- gence, degraded still more by incessant flattery, reft of all that is truest and noblest in the conscience of man by a life which has virtually imbruted him, welcoming the altars, and the incense, and the titles, and the temples, which announce his so-termed divinity to a population of slaves. But that a good man, in his right mind, should know himself to be only human, and yet should speak as does Jesus Christ in the text, is inconceivable. The best men, being only men, who have spoken and worked for God have always striven to exalt their work, their message, their commission, their Master, while they efface themselves. Do you whisper that such language as our Lord's is Oriental, and must not be judged by the standards of the 36 The Revelation to St. Thomas. [Serm. modern and European world ? Well, the prophets are Orientals. Which prophet ever uses any language that distantly resembles that before us ? Do they not always distinguish between themselves and their message? Do they not prostrate themselves deeper in adoration and self-abasement the more nearly they approach the Most Holy ? Consider the greatest of them, all, Isaiah, when he has been permitted to see the Vision of the Lord amid the seraphim, "in the year that King Uzziah died." " Woe is me ! " he cries, " for I am undone ; because I am a man of unclean lips . . . for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts." a Depend on it, no mere man, whether European or Oriental, whether belonging to the ancient or the modern world, could speak, if he were a good man, as does our Lord. He would have said, " I show you the way ; but I try, as God enables me, to tread it with you. I proclaim to you the truth; but think, think only, of the truth and forget the teacher. I announce the gift of a new life from Heaven ; but I can only point to that which comes from the Author of all good, and which I need as much as yourselves." This would have been the language of merely human good- ness, and of the highest human goodness. The mere man who should tell his fellows that he himself was not only the way that they should follow, but the truth which could satisfy, and the life which could save them, would surely be guilty of a preposterous immodesty of which it would be difficult to say whether it were more blasphemous or more grotesque. No ; face to face with an utterance like this — and, as you know, it by no means stands alone in the Gospels — we have to choose between taking Jesus Christ at His Word, and, with all the centuries of Christendom, adoring Him as we must adore the Being a Isa. vi. 1-5. The Revelation to St. Thomas. 3 7 Who Alone may thus proclaim Himself to man, or else refusing Him even that measure of respect which is due to human goodness and reasonableness ; to the modesty which shrinks from untenable self-assertion, to the hu- mility which loves to keep self in the background, to the truthfulness which will knowingly make no terms with anything that savours of exaggeration or imposture. If the human character of Jesus Christ is to be respected, we must confess that Jesus Christ is God. And, secondly, this gracious and wonderful revelation of our Lord's real Divinity, thus elicited by His hesitating and critical disciple, should be especially welcome to us when we are looking forward to the yearly Festival of His Birth into the world. The lowly associations of Beth- lehem may too easily put us off our guard, and lead us to forget Who He was That chose for His mother a Jewish maiden in humble life, and made His cradle in the stall of the ox and the ass. Let us not neglect the many duties which this blessed Festival, the yearly consecration of all that is purest and best in family life, lays on all who can discharge them ; let us do what we may to enable the young and the poor and the unbefriended to feel in material as well as spiritual ways the light and warmth of the Sun of Kighteousness on the morning of His rising to bless the world. Christmas gatherings, like the holly which decorates our churches and our homes, are the appropriate garniture of this most popular of festivals ; but oh ! let us be sure that in heart and mind we rise through and beyond these outward things to Him Who is " the Way, and the Truth, and the Life" of souls, and Who could not guide and teach and quicken us as He does, unless He were indeed the Only Begotten and the Eternal, " Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from Heaven." a 0 The Nicene Creed. SERMON III. THE GOSPEL COVENANT. Jer. xxxi. 31-34. Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah : not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day thai I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt ; which My covenant they brake, although I teas an Husband unto them, saith the Lord: but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts ; and will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord : for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord : for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. JERUSALEM had been taken by the Babylonian army, and the Prophet Jeremiah, with a band of other captives, had been carried in chains to Ramah, where the Babylonian general Nebuzar-adan, had fixed his head-quar- ters. In those dark hours, when the Prophet was leaving a ruined home, and passing into the keeping of a pagan despot, it might well have seemed to a merely human forecast that all was lost ; the independence of Israel as a people, and even the prospects of the religion of Israel. In those dark hours, God, Who so often sets His bow in the cloud of an earthly sorrow, spoke to Jeremiah in The Gospel Covenant. 39 visions which lit up his inward thoughts with the light that comes from another world. To this period of his life belong the thirtieth and thirty-first chapters of his book ; and they contain a group of prophecies!, written down, we are told, by Divine command, and all of them intended to relieve the gloom of the first days of Captivity by the anticipation of better times beyond. The ultimate restoration of the people to their home in Palestine ; a the announcement of the second David ; b the picture of Rachel weeping from her tomb at Eamah for her captive descend- ants, and relieved by the sure promise of their deliverance ; c and, lastly, the proclamation of the New Covenant; 3 — these form a group of consolatory prophecies, each one of which is a perfect composition in itself, while all are directed to promote a common object. And of these the last, the prophecy of the New Covenant, is the most important. I say it is the most important ; for this prophecy is singled out to occupy a place of great prominence in the New Testament. When the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews is engaged in showing that the old Priesthood of the Law was done away at Christ's coming, because Christ was the true "Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedek," e Whom the Old Testament itself had led men to expect, he enforces his argument by observing that the Jewish Priesthood, and the old covenant of God with Israel, must stand or fall together, as parts of one re- ligious whole; and that, therefore, the Jewish Priesthood must have been abolished, because the old covenant to which it belonged was, according to the Jewish Prophet, to give way to a new and a better covenant.* Thus it is that this passage of Jeremiah is lifted by the Apostolic writings into a prominence which is almost uniojie ; and a Jer. xsx. xxxi. 1-9. b lb. xxx. 9. 0 lb. xxxi. 15, 17. d lb. xxxi. 31-34. e Heb. v. 6, 10; vi. 20 ; vii. 17, 21. { lb. viii. 40 The Gospel Covenant. [Serm. it will supply us, I hope, with some useful thoughts at a season when Christians are thinking of the preparation which God made for Christianity before Christ came, and of what was said about it by the Prophets who were inspired to prepare the world for the Divine Eedeemer, and for those new relations between earth and Heaven which He was to introduce. I. Here, then, we observe, first of all, that the Christian religion is described as a New Covenant. " Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel, and the house of Judah." The Gospel was, we remember, to be preached among all nations, but beginning at Jerusalem." a The " Israel after the flesh" b was to be widened into " the Israel of God," c and was to embrace the world. The covenant would be new ; for it had had predecessors. God is said to have made a covenant with Noah, when He promised that a judgment like the flood should not be repeated ; d and with Abraham, when He promised Canaan to his descendants for an everlasting possession, and imposed the condition of circumcision. e But by the phrase, " the Old Covenant," is meant especially the covenant which God made with Israel as a people on Mount Sinai.' The writing termed the " Book of the Covenant " com- prised the Ten Commandments, and the body of laws which are recorded in the twenty-first and two following chapters of Exodus. These were the conditions imposed by God, when He entered into covenant relations with Israel ; and the solemn act by which this covenant was tt St. Luke xxiv. 47. b 1 Cor. x. 18. c Gal. vi. 16. d Gen. is. 8-17. c lb. xvii. 9-14 r Exod. xix. 7, 8. The Gospel Covenant. 4i first inaugurated is described in the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus. Gathered at the base of the holy mountain, before an altar resting on twelve pillars, in honour of the twelve tribes, the people waited silent and awestruck, while twelve delegates (as yet there was no Priesthood) offered such sacrifices as yet were possible, and while the Lawgiver sprinkled the blood of the victims upon the assembled multitude.* That ceremony had a latent mean- ing, unperceived at the time, which many centuries after- wards would be drawn out into the light under Apostolic direction ; b but the solemn character of the transaction ■was there and then profoundly felt. And at later periods of Israel's history this covenant was again and again renewed; as by Joshua at Shechem, c and by King Asa at Jerusalem/ 1 and by Jehoiada the Priest in the Temple, 0 and by the Priesthood and people under Hezekiah, f and under the auspices of Ezra s and Nehemiah h in later days still, after the great Captivity. It was renewed because it was continually broken. It was a Divine work, and yet, through man's perverseness, it was a failure. And hence the words, " Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I led them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt ; which covenant they brake, although I was an Husband to them, saith the Lord." " The New Covenant " is a phrase which sounds strange to the ears of Christians, who have been accustomed all their life to talk of " the New Testament." A covenant is a compact or agreement, and it implies something like equal rights between the parties to it. Monarchs make covenants or treaties with monarchs, nations with nations; a Exod. xxiv. 3-8. d 2 Chron. xv. 8-15. 8 Ezra x. 3. b Heb. ix. 18-26. c Josh. xxiv. 1-25. c 2 Kings xi. 4, 17. f 2 Chron. xxix. 10. " Neh. ix. 38. 42 The Gospel Covenant. [Serm. one private person signs a deed of agreement with another. Laban made a covenant with Jacob upon a heap of stones, to attest its reality ; a the Gibeonites made a covenant with Israel ; b the men of Jabesh, in their extremity, proposed, but in vain, to make a covenant with Nahash, the Ammonite king. c In all such covenants a certain equality of relations between the contracting parties is assumed ; each party acquires rights, each accepts liabilities. Even when, as> sometimes happens, the Government of a great Power enters into a contract with a house of business or with an individual, this is because the firm or person in ques- tion is, for the purposes of the contract, on terms of equality with the negotiating Government, as having at its disposal the means of rendering some signal service, which for the moment throws all other considerations into the background. And this general equality between parties to a covenant may be further illustrated in the case of the most sacred of all human contracts — the marriage tie ; that marriage tie which, by the law of God, once made, can be dissolved only by death, and in which it is the glory of the Christian law (I do not speak of all human legislation in Christian countries) to have secured to the contracting parties equal rights. It is, then, a little startling to find this same word employed to describe a relation between the Infinite and Eternal God and the creatures of His Hand. He wants nothing, and He has everything to give; man needs everything, and can do nothing that will increase a Blessedness Which is already infinite, or enhance a Power Which as it is knows no bounds. But here are covenants between God and man in which there seems no place for reciprocity ; covenants in which indulgence or endow- a Gen. xxxi. 44. ' b Josh. ix. 6, 15. c 1 Sam. xi. 1. The Gospel Covenant. 43 nient is all on one side, and acknowledgment, or rather failure, all on the other; covenants in naming which language seems, at first sight, to forfeit its wonted mean- ing, and to betray us into misconceptions which bring, to say the least, confusion and bewilderment. And yet in reality, when God speaks of making a covenant with man, He is only giving one instance of that law of condescension, of which the highest result appeared when He, the Infinite, took on Him a human Form ; when He, the Eternal, entered as Man into fellowship with the children of time. God covenanting with Abraham is a prelude to God lying as an Infant in the Manger of Bethlehem, or dying for our sins on the Cross of Calvary. Certainly, when He makes a covenant with His creatures, He puts Himself and them in a new position ; He makes the most of them, and the least of Himself. He gives promises or blessings of vast import; He exacts some duty, which He is pleased to treat as an equivalent. Abraham must practise and enforce circumcision ; a Israel must keep the Law of Sinai. b Covenants are thus a part of the machinery of Divine condescension ; by them God might seem to treat man as parents sometimes treat their children ; placing them for a festive occasion in a position of supposed equality, and investing them with attributes and an importance which only belong to the years of manhood, and to a position which, from the nature of the case, is beyond their own. A covenant, then, is a contract or compact ; and the question cannot but occur to us how a covenant which God makes with His people should have come to be called a testament. For the words " covenant " and " testament " represent a single word in each of the original languages ; c and this circumstance has been made the ground of attacks a Gen. xvii. 9-14. D Exod. xx.-xxiii. c ZiaQ-qirn, nna. 44 The Gospel Covenant. [Serm. upon the Bible, as if the sacred writers were playing tricks with words, or were employing an instrument of which they only half understood the value. Some of my hearers will have met with these objections, and while I notice them, I must bespeak for a few minutes the patience and charity of those who happily have not. A testament, then, is a will. It has this in common with a covenant, that it is a kind of settlement. But it differs from a covenant or contract in relation to our human concerns, in that while a covenant or contract is a transaction between the living, a will or testament con- nects the living with the intentions of the dead. " Where a testament is," says the Apostolic writer, " there must of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is of force after men are dead : otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth." a And yet the two words " covenant " and " testament " are, as has been stated, used in our English Bible to translate a single word in the original which includes both meanings; and this twofold rendering of a single word is not merely allowable, but necessary. The Hebrew word originally means nothing more than a contract or covenant. A disposition of property made by a man in his lifetime, to have effect only after his death, was a pro- ceeding foreign to the life of ancient Israel, and there is no word in the old Hebrew language to express it. But the Greek word, which in the New Testament stands for the Hebrew word " covenant," means, originally, a tes- tamentary disposition or will — a sufficiently familiar idea to the Greek world. The Greek-speaking Jews of Alex- andria, who, some two hundred years and more before our Lord, turned the Old Testament bit by bit into Greek, as it was wanted for use in their synagogues, and then made a Heb. ix. 16, 17. Ill] The Gospel Covenant. 45 out of these fragments the great version which we call the Septuagint, used the Greek word for " will " to trans- late the Hebrew word " covenant," because they observed that the old covenants of God with the patriarchs and with Israel did involve actual bequest?, such as the pos- session of Canaan, which could only be inherited in a distant future. Thus the Hebrew word, meaning a con- tract, was strained by its actual use to mean a bequest ; and the Greek word, meaning primarily, although not exclusively, a will, acquired by its associations the sense of a covenant or contract. He, Who by His Providence controls the course of human events and the currents of human thought, does also most assuredly shape human speech so that it may do His work ; and it is His doing, and not a chance irre- gularity, that the original word in the New Testament had thus come to mean both covenant and testament. For that which it was to describe answered to both mean- ings. Eeligion as such, and the Eeligion of the Gospel especially, is at once a compact with God and a bequest from God. The Gospel, I say, is a contract or covenant because its blessings are conditionally bestowed ; they must be met by faith, hope, love, repentance, Christian activity in all its forms. And it is a will or testament, more obviously than was the Mosaic covenant ; for it was made by our Lord when His Death was in full view. He, Who alone could use such words without folly or blasphemy, took the cup into His Blessed Hands, and when He had given thanks, He gave it to His disciples, saying, " Drink ye all of this : for this is My Blood of the New Testament, Which is being poured out for you and for many for the remission of sins." a And yet this very testament is so conditioned as to be a covenant too ; and a St. Matt. sxvi. 27, 28. 4 6 The Gospel Covenant. [Serm. the solemn words to which I have just referred were but an echo of the saying in the Prophet, " Behold, I make a New Covenant." II. Of this New Covenant in the Gospel, there were, accord- ing to Jeremiah, to be three characteristics. We cannot suppose that he is giving us an exhaustive description : he selects these three points because they form a vivid and easily understood contrast between the New Covenant and the Old, between Christianity and Judaism. a. First, then, in those who have a real r part in the New Covenant, the Law of God was not to be simply or chiefly an outward rule ; it was to be an inward principle. The ordinary Israelite thought of the Divine Law as something outside him. True, he had to conform to it, to submit to it, to obey it, as he could ; and, as St. Paul says, he made his boast a in it, since he felt that it gave him national and religious prestige to belong to fore- fathers who had received it from Heaven. But he shrank from its exacting requirements, from its stern warnings ; he kept it, in his imagination, reverently at a distance. It was, he rejoiced to proclaim, traced by the Finger of God ; but it was laid up in the Sacred Ark, or, in later ages, it was hidden — so said accepted traditions — in some mysterious cave ever since the Chaldean capture of the Temple. He was proud of it as the chief glory of a Religion whose requirements he scarcely attempted to fulfil. Of course, there were exceptions in ancient Israel ; such as that most spiritual of the later poets, who, in the dark night of the Captivity, poured forth from his fervid soul the hundred and nineteenth Psalm ; one long cele- * Rom. ii. 23. Ill] The Gospel Covenant. 47 -bration of the beauty and power of the Divine Law, as manifested in the life and as ruling the affections of a sincere Israelite. But, as a rule, it was prized and dis- obeyed ; like some great family name which is valued as ■a social passport, while its attendant obligations to lead a noble life are generally disregarded. With the New Covenant it was to be otherwise. " This is the covenant which I will make in those days, saith the Lord : I will put My Law in their inward parts, and write it upon their hearts." The Law was to be no longer an outward rule, condemning the inward life, or even raising the spirit of rebellion. It was to be an inward principle, not running counter to the will, but shaping it, and claiming the obedience, not of its fear, but of its love, nay, of its enthusiasm. In the Christian Church, as St. Paul says, it was to be written, "not on tables of stone, but on the fleshy tables of the heart." a It was to present itself, not as a summons from without the soul, but as an impulse from within ; not as declaring that which had to be done or foregone, but as describing that which it was already a joy to forego or to do. In short, a new Power — the Spirit of Jesus Christ, endowing Christians with the new Nature of Jesus Christ — would be within the soul, and would effect the change. " What the Law of Moses could not do, in that it was weak " through the weakness of human nature, God sending His own Son in the like- ness of sinful humanity, and for sin, condemned sin in human nature : that the righteousness of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the rule of an old nature, but after that of the new. b The language of the hundred and nineteenth Psalm should be that of every Christian who has a true share in the New Covenant. " The Law of Thy Mouth is dearer unto me than thou- 0 2 Cor. iii. 3. b Eom. viii. 3, 4. 4 8 The Gospel Covenant. [Serm. sands of gold and silver ; " a " Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage ; " b " Lord, what love have I unto Thy Law ! all the day long is my study in it." c (3. A second note of participation in the New Covenant is the growth of the soul in the knowledge of Divine Truth. In ancient Israel, as now, men learnt what they could about God from human teachers. But the truths which they learned, though inculcated with great industry, were, in the great majority of cases, not really mastered, because there was no accompanying process of interpretation and adjustment within the soul. It was to be otherwise in the future. " And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord : for all shall know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them." In the New Covenant the Divine Teacher, without dispensing with such human instruments as were wanted, would do the most important part of His work Himself. He would make truth plain to the soul, and would enamour the soul of truth by such instruction as is beyond the reach of human argument and language, since it belongs to the world of spirit. " Ye have an unction from the Holy One," said St. John to his readers, " and ye know all things." d " Listen not," says St. Augus- tine, " too eagerly to the outward words : the Master is within." 6 This explains a fact which has been frequently observed, namely, how often the apprehension of religious truth is found to be out of all proportion to the natural abilities, or cultivation, or acquirements of persons who really a Ps. cxix. 72. b lb. 54. c lb. 97. d 1 St. John ii. 20. e The whole of St. Augustine's Dialogue with Adeodatus, known as the book De Magistro, is an expansion of this (Op. i. 541, sqq., ed. Ben.). Ill] The Gospel Covenant. 49 apprehend it. Not seldom do the very poor, who can hardly read, or not read at all, but who have made the most of such Christian instruction as God has placed in their way, show by a stray observation how high and how deep their thoughts do reach about Divine things; how eminent is their position in that invisible school of Christ, in which precedence is assigned, not to natural acuteness, but to spiritual illumination; how little, in order to perfect His work, the Unseen Teacher is dependent upon the circumstances which we value so highly. y. A third characteristic of the New Covenant was to be the forgiveness of sins. " I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." This, although stated last, is really a precedent condition of the other two. While sins are unforgiven, there can be no writing of the moral Law upon the heart, and no illumination of the soul in the secrets of Divine Truth. For these pre- rogatives imply that the Christian soul is inhabited by a Divine Tenant ; that Christ, the Hope of glory, a is in Chris- tians, because His Spirit has made and still keeps a home for Him in the will and intellect of the regenerate soul. But this transcendent privilege is the wildest of baseless dreams if it be indeed true that the sins of the past are unforgiven. And in the average Jew they were unforgiven. The sacrifices of atonement under the Jewish Law pro- vided a legal or external pardon; they could not put away moral guilt. " It was not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could put away sin." b They were only shadows of the real Atonement, which was to be offered once for all by the Perfect Representative of our race. His voluntary Death was to be the highest expression of I a perfectly obedient Will ; His Blood, as the symbol of a Col. i. 27. s Heb. x. 4. D 5o The Gospel Covenant. [Serm. His Death, and as instinct with His Life, was to have a propitiatory virtue to the end of time. " In Whom we have redemption through His Blood, even forgiveness of sins " a — that is the motto which Christian faith traces above the Crucified Saviour. For all the avenues of pardon here below ; the one Baptism for the remission of sins ; the power and commandment given to God's ministers to declare and pronounce to His people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their sins ; the pardoning virtue of sorrow pressed to the heart by faith and love ; the humble trembling hope whispered within that all has been blotted out ; — these altogether draw then- power from the Great Sacrifice on Calvary. " This is a true saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." b This salva- tion must begin with pardon, and pardon is man's first advantage secured by the New Covenant between himself and God. Here, then, we seem to have marked out for us some considerations which may be turned to practical account. What is our share, individually, in the blessings of the New Covenant? Are we able to hope that we do in any true sense love the Law of God because it is His Law, and that, amid weakness, we obey it because obedience is welcome to us, because disobedience would be painful ? Or is our Christian rule of life like the Israelite's Law of old, written, so far as we are concerned, only in our Bibles and Prayer-books, but not incor- porated with the substance of our soul's life? Can we trace, as time goes on, any progressive growth in the knowledge of God ; of His attributes of Power, Wisdom, and Love, of His Bevealed Will, of His relations with a Col. i. 14. b 1 Tim. i. 15. Ill] The Gospel Covenant. 5i ourselves, of His inconceivable tenderness and condescen- sion in Kedemption and Grace ? Or is it the case with us that, while our understandings have been growing in strength and capacity in all other directions and for all other purposes, our knowledge of the Infinite and Eternal Being is just what it was ten, twenty, thirty years ago — if, indeed, it be not less — because no inward Teacher has grafted inwardly on our hearts the truths which have fallen on the outward ear ? Are we rejoicing in the sense of God's pardoning Love in Jesus Christ, extended to us, though most unworthy, not only in Baptism, but after transgressions of God's Law in later life ; or have we not yet learnt what true repentance means ; the repentance without which pardon is for ever impossible ? By these questions we may test the reality of our share in the New Covenant. Here, perhaps, brethren, some of you will say that you like to think of yourselves as living under the New Testament, and that you conceive of the New Testament as containing a legacy of unstinted benevolence to which no conditions whatever are attached. Doubtless the Gospel, as a testament or will, does ensure to the succes- sive generations of Christendom a splendid patrimony ; under its terms we inherit the infinite merits of the Bedeemer, the sanctifying power of the Spirit, the grace and virtue of the Sacraments, the instruction and en- couragement of the Holy Scriptures, ay, and a perpetual right of access in prayer "into the Holiest by the Blood of Jesus, through a new and living way, which He has consecrated," a and which is open to faith while time shall last. Doubtless the Gospel is a will, and we Chris- tians are the legatees in whose favour it is made. But it is also a will to which conditions are attached ; and these " Heb. x. 19, 20. 52 The Gospel Covenant. conditions make it practically a contract, a covenant. Do not let us deceive ourselves. Those exhilarating pro- mises of a Law written on the heart, of the communication of truth by an Invisible Teacher, of the plenary forgive- ness of sins, imply accompanying engagements and duties. They imply faith, hope, love ; they imply a straightforward desire to make the best of religious opportunities. They imply renunciation of our spiritual enemies, belief in the Articles of the Christian Faith, and obedience to God's Holy Will and Commandments ; a the three terms of the great engagement which was promised and vowed in our uames when we first entered into covenant with Christ. We cannot do ill in sifting this matter, each for himself, at this sacred season. Religion, it has been finely said, rests on a sense of gratitude balanced by a sense of responsibility. By all means let us hail in the New Testament mercies which should rouse our deepest gratitude. But let us not forget that the New Testament is also the New Covenant. Let us think much of the responsibilities which that word implies. Let us bear in mind that a Covenant implies not only rights but duties ; and let us shape our lives by this conviction, " so much the more, as we see the day v approaching." b a See the Church Catechism. b Heb. x. 25. SERMON IV. THE FAME OF EPHEATAH. (FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT.) Ps. cxxxn. 6. Lo, ice heard of the same at Ephratah, and found it in the wood. THE hundred and thirty-second is the last of the six Proper Psalrns which the Church uses on Christmas Day ; and the reason for its selection is probably to be found in the verse before us, " Lo, we heard of the same at Ephratah." Ephratah, or, as it is sometimes written, Ephrath, is an old title of Bethlehem. We are told in Genesis that " Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem." a In their address to Boaz on his marriage to Buth, the elders of the place bade him " do worthily in Ephratah, and be famous in Bethlehem ; " b and in his great prophecy of the Nativity the Prophet Micah combines the two names into one : " But thou, Bethlehem-Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall He come forth unto Me that is to be Buler in Israel." c Ephratah, then, is certainly Bethlehem ; and as Beth- lehem was the birthplace of our Lord and Saviour, and is not referred to by name in any other Psalm, this may " Gen. xxxv. 19. b Ruth iv. 11. c Micah v. 2. 54 The fame of EpJiratah. [Serm. have appeared a sufficient reason for the use of this Psalm in the proper service for Christmas Day. But here the question arises, Who or what was it that was heard of at Ephratah, and found in the fields of the wood? The context makes clear what the answer to this question must be. It was the ark of the covenant. It seems likely that this Psalm, as it now stands, was compiled at some time after the Exile, but compiled out of inspired fragments which had been composed at different periods of Jewish history. Of these frag- ments the earliest probably belongs to the age of David ; and of this fragment the text is a part. The later com- piler recalls before God, in David's words, David's vow, that he would not rest until he had provided a sanctuary for the homeless ark. " I will not come into the tabernacle of mine house, Nor climb up into my bed ; I will not suffer mine eyes to sleep, Nor mine eyelids to slumber, Neither the temples of my head to take any rest, Until I find out a place for the Lord, An habitation for the mighty God of Jacob." a And then he recalls the words of the people at the time — " Lo ! we heard of it [that is, the ark] at Ephratah ; "We found it in the fields of the wood [that is, at Kirjath-jearim]. We will go into His tabernacle, And fall low on our knees before His footstool." The period to which these words belong is that which elapsed between the return of the ark from its seven months' captivity among the Philistines, and its triumphal and solemn conveyance by David to Mount Zion. Is there anything in the Bible history to show that during this time, or any time, the ark was at Ephratah, or Beth- " Ps. cxxxii. 3-5. IV] The fame of Ephratah. 55 lehem? Certainly the ark was still a Avanderer, at a distance from that tabernacle, of which it was the most important feature. When the Philistines, terror-stricken at the calamities which its presence had brought upon them, a restored it to Israel, it was for many years kept among different Levitical families, living on the western portion of Judah, until David, at a great national festival, conducted it to Jerusalem. b But, so far as we know, the ark never, in the course of its wanderings, went so far to the south as Bethlehem ; it would not naturally have gone thither, between its sojourn in the house of Aminadab at Kirjath-jearim, and its sojourn in the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite. Its movements were confined to a district away to the north-west of Bethle- hem ; and the difficulty of its being heard of at Bethle- hem is not removed by the suggestion that the speakers 'in the Psalm were themselves at Bethlehem when they heard of the ark, but that the ark itself was not thought of as being there. For the plain meaning of the lan- guage is, not that the ark was heard of by persons at Bethlehem, but that it was heard of as being itself at Bethlehem. Either, therefore, some incident in the pro- gress of the ark is here referred to, to which no reference or clue is given us in the historical books of the Old Testament, and for which they appear to leave no room ; or, more probably, we have before us a prophetic impulse or inspiration, which, as is the manner of prophecy, loses sight for the moment of its immediate object as a greater object, still more future, and of which the former is a type or anticipation, comes into view. Of this we have a striking example in our Lord's prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem merging in that of the end of the world, in the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew; and it is at a 1 Sam. v.-vi. 1-1S. b 2 Sam. vi. 1-18. 56 The fame of Epliratah. [Seem. least probable that in the case before us attention is drawn to Bethlehem as the scene on which would be dis- played, in a later age, a Presence to Which the ark pointed onwards, and Which has made the little Jewish village famous throughout all time. I. Here let us ask ourselves what the ark was. It was an oblong chest or box, made out of shittim wood, a variety of the acacia. It measured rather more than four feet in length, and two in breadth and height. This chest was covered with plates of gold, within and without ; while upon its upper lid was the mercy-seat, the throne of the Divine Presence in the midst of Israel. On either side of this were figures of the cherubim ; figures, be it observed, that were made, notwithstanding the second commandment, by Divine command. 0. Now, although the ark was the most sacred object in the tabernacle, it was not, if the expression may be allowed, an original feature in the religion of Israel. Like other things, it was borrowed from Egypt. To this day may be seen, on the walls of ancient temples in Egypt, bas-reliefs of processions in which Egyptian priests are carrying sacred chests, and of some of these representa- tions the date is several centuries earlier than the date of Moses. There can be no reasonable doubt that the ark of the covenant in Israel was an adaptation of this feature of the old religion of Egypt to the worship of the one true Grod ; and there is no reason why such a fact as this should be regarded as an obstacle to faith. Inspiration does not always take the form of original suggestion ; it is not unfrequently guidance in selection ; * Exod. xxv. 1 8. IV] The fame of Ephratah. 57 it teaches how to choose out of a mixed mass of materials those elements which will illustrate or will harmoniously combine with the true religion. In this way the authors of the Books of Kings and Chronicles were guided to incorporate with their works certain documents which already existed, while they left others on one side : and St. Paul was taught to retain and to use certain argu- ments which he had learnt in the Kabbinical schools at Jerusalem, while he deliberately neglected others ; and to sanction certain features of the thought and language of ancient Greece, while ignoring or condemning the rest. The position that all the thought, all the practices, all the usages of the old heathen religions were equally bad, was never bluntly stated until some Puritan divines stated it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Tertullian, perhaps, comes near doing so, in the third. The Puritan divines were quarrelling with the Church about usages which she still retained in common with certain heathen religions, such, for instance, as the use of the surplice ; but in that day men did not know enough to understand how this objection of theirs, if it was an objection, told against the Bible. We know now that all heathen systems, instead of being wholly false, are in different proportions conglomerates of falsehood and truth, and so differ from the Christian Kevelation, which is wholly true, and from pure atheism, which is wholly false. Certainly, when Moses was guided to adapt to the worship of the true God the Egyptian symbol of a consecrated chest or ark, he was obeying one of the most common forms of inspiration. II. In the days to which tlie Psalmist's words refer, the ark provided satisfaction for certain instincts of the 53 The fame of Ephratah. [Seem. human soul, which any powerful and lasting religion must satisfy in some way or other. The first demand of a soul is that a religion shall be true ; and the second, that it shall provide some demonstrably efficient means of communion with Him Who is the Object of religion — the Infinite and Eternal God. But besides these demands there are three others of a subordinate kind. The idea of God kindles in the soul the sense of beauty; and beauty that meets the eye suggests the immaterial beauty of the Invisible King. No religion can afford perma- nently to neglect this instinct of the human soul; there is no revealed connection between religious truth or real spirituality on the one hand, and slovenliness or deformity on the other. Then the Eternity of God kindles in the soul a reverence for antiquity, as the best sort of approach that anything on earth can make to God's eternal years ; and thus all powerful and lasting religions have sought the sanction of antiquity. Christianity did so in its earliest days, by linking itself on to the Scriptures of Judaism ; Christ Himself proclaimed, " I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil" 3 them. And, once more, the Divine Being, far removed as He is from the reach of human sense, sug- gests to man that any religion that reflects His Mind must have attaching to it an element of mystery. A religion which should be, as people say, plain and intelligible from beginning to end, presenting no difficulties, sug- gesting no unanswered questions to a finite understanding, might be respectable as the work of a human manufac- turer of religious theories. But it would carry on its front the proclamation and certificate of falsehood, if it should lay claim to Divine authority, or undertake to provide satisfaction for the soul of man. Now, in these three respects the ark largely satisfied a St. Mutt. v. 17. The fame of Ephratah. 59 the religious needs of Israel. It was, to begin with, a beautiful object ; beautiful in itself, and especially with relation to the art of that day. And, in David's time, it was already ancient : it had shared the early and anxious fortunes of Israel in the desert ; while during its sojourn in Shiloh, it had gathered round it a large store of religious and national associations. Once more, there was an element of mystery that surrounded it : it was shrouded from the popular sight by prescribed coverings ; its contents, and the Presence Which accompanied it, were suggestive of much beyond. The mystery which attached especially to the mercy-seat impressed the heart of Israel with a mingled feeling of love and fear. And a heavy penalty was paid by any who, like Uzzah, ventured to break through the awful reverence which should have protected it from profane intrusion or handling. 8. But here it is necessary to go more into detail, and, by way of doing so, we may observe that the ark of the covenant, of this shape, these dimensions, this historical origin — beautiful, ancient, mysterious — was in two respects especially remarkable. It was remarkable, first of all, on account of its con- tents. These were, in the early ages of Israel, threefold. First of all there were the tables of the Law, written by the Finger of God. b Next, as we are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews, there was Aaron's rod that budded, and the pot of manna. 0 These had certainly been ordered to be kept before the testimony,* 1 or tables of the Law ; but it would seem that in Solomon's days they had disappeared, as at his dedication of the Temple we are expressly told there was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone. 6 Each of these relics reminded Israel of a serious truth. ■ 2 Sam. vi. 6, J. b Exorl. xxv. 16, 21 ; Deut. x. 1-5. c Heb. ix. 4. a Numb. xvii. 10 ; Exod. xvi. 34. e 1 Kings viii. 9. 6o The fame of Ephratah. [Seem. Aaron's rod was the symbol of Israel's communion with God in prayer and sacrifice, since it witnessed to the Divine authority of the Jewish priesthood. The pot of manna was the witness of Israel's dependence upon God for material as well as spiritual blessings ; it recalled the Divine bounty which had saved Israel from famine in the desert. But the most important, as well as the most per- manent of the contents of the ark, was the tables of the Law, before which the rod and the manna were " laid up." The preservation of these tables in the ark not only im- plied that the precepts inscribed on them were obligatory on the conscience of Israel ; it was a vivid and striking representation of the fact that the Moral Law was the most sacred thing in Israel, as being a statement in human speech not only of the Will but of the Nature of God. The tables of the Law were thus a symbol of the essential Holiness of God ; of that attribute which the high intelligences of heaven incessantly adore with their "Holy, Holy, Holy!" a Secondly, the ark was distinguished by the Presence Which rested on it. . Not only was it the support of the mercy-seat, while it enclosed the letter of the covenant, on the observance of which God's favour depended. But this symbolical meaning of the ark and its cover was empha- sized by an Appearance above it, between the cherubim, manifesting so much of the beauty and glory of God as it was possible for His creatures to witness in this mortal state. A light of extraordinary brightness appeared on particular occasions ; but for the most part it was shrouded in a cloud which alone was visible. This the later Jews called the Shekinah, meaning that which rested or dwelt b here below, and implying that it belonged originally to a higher sphere. This peculiar manifestation of the Divine a Isa. vi. 3. 1 From pvf. IV] The fame of Ephratah. 61 Presence accompanied the Israelites from Egypt at the Exodus, added not a little to the confusion of the Egyp- tians when in pursuit of them, and finally took possession of the tabernacle at its completion, 8, just as in after years, at the dedication of Solomon's Temple, " the cluud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud : for the Glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord." b While there is no reason for thinking that, either in the tabernacle or the first temple, the cloud was ever withdrawn from its place between the cherubim, it is clear that the overpowering light which it concealed was only made visible on rare occasions. Even when Moses "heard the voice of One speaking unto him from off the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubims," c the radiance of the Shekinah does not seem to have ap- peared. But it flashed forth from the cloud before the falling of the manna, d and at the first sacrifices offered by Aaron after his consecration, 6 or sometimes in token of the Divine displeasure, as when the people prepared to stone Joshua and Caleb on their return from their visit to the Promised Land/ or when Korah and his fellow- rebels gathered themselves together against the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, 5 or when the people murmured against Moses and Aaron in Kadesh. 11 On these occasions the "glory," that is the brilliant light which was concealed by the cloud, is said to have become visible, either to the whole population, or to those immediately around or within the tabernacle. Those who believe that the Lord of the moral world is also the Author and Euler of the natural world, will * Exod. xiv. 24; xl. 34, 35. b 1 Kings viii. 10, II. c Numb. vii. 89. d Exod. xvi. 10. e Lev. ix. 23. f Numb. xiv. 10. > lb, xvi. 19. h lb. xx. 6. 62 The fame of Ephratah. [Serm.. scarcely dispute His right thus to employ the resources of nature in the interests of His moral government. We cannot read the Psalms without perceiving the influence on devout minds of this Sacred Presence in the midst of Israel. It explains the cry of agony in the Chaldean invasion : " Show Thyself, Thou that sittest upon the cherubims." a It gave point to David's reflection on the power of prayer in days when God spake to His servants out of the cloudy pillar. b It prompted the shout of triumph when the sons of Kohath lifted the sacred ark, as it went forward in procession : " Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered : let them also that hate Him flee before Him." 0 It enables us to understand the poet of a later age, when he describes that supreme disaster which broke the heart of the old high priest. d At the capture of the ark God delivered their Power into captivity, and their Beauty into the enemies' hand. e It shows us the peculiar malignity of the idolatry of which the Israelites had been guilty at the foot of Sinai, when they turned their " Glory" — of Whose supersensuous beauty they might have learnt somewhat from the Shekinah — into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay. { And so in the Psalm before us; no sooner is the ark referred to, than the Psalmist adds, " We will go into His tabernacle, and fall low on our knees before His footstool," that is, before the ark, which was beneath the Sacred Presence. " Arise," he continues, " O Lord, into Thy resting-place ; Thou, and the ark of Thy strength." 3 Indeed, the Shekinah which rested on the mercy-seat will alone explain the peculiar fervour of the devotional language about the tabernacle, or the temple, which so Ps. lxxx. r. b lb. xcix. 7. d 1 Sam. iv. 17, iS. f lb. cvi. 20. c lb. lxviii. I. e Fs. lxxviii. 62. s lb. cxxxii. 7, 8. IV] The fame of Ephratah. 63 often meets us in the Psalter. The Shekinak made the sense of the Presence of God, His Holiness, His Justice, His Mercy, vivid to the mind of the pious Israelite. It made the Israelite fear to approach his Lord and Master in a condition of conscious disobedience or moral pollu- tion. " Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle, Or who shall rest upon Thy holy hill? Even he, that leadeth an uncorrupt life, And doeth the thing that is right, And speaketh the truth from his heart. He that hath used no deceit in his tongue, Nor done evil unto his neighbour, And hath not slandered his neighbour. He that setteth not by himself, But is lowly in his own eyes, And maketh much of them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth unto his neighbour, And disappointeth him not, though it were to his own hindrance. He that hath not given his money upon usury, Nor taken reward against the innocent. AVhoso doeth these things shall never fall." a And yet, while the Presence on the ark thus awed the Israelite into moral disobedience, it attracted him with a fascination which he felt most keenly when separated from it. Thus David — " One thing have I desired of the Lord, which I will require, Even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, To behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to visit His temple." b So a later Psalmist in temporary exile — " Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, So longeth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul is atliirst for God, yea, even for tho living God : When shall I come to appear before the Presence of God ? " c a Ps. xv. b lb. xxvii. 4. 0 lb. xlii. 1, 2. 64 The fame of Ephratah. [Seem. So another Psalmist, at a distance from Jerusalem, but certainly before the Babylonish captivity — " O bow amiable are Tby dwellings, Thou Lord of hosts ! My soul bath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord ; My heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young, Even Thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Blessed are they that dwell in Tby bouse ; They will be always praising Thee." a III. If we believe that the people of Israel was privileged to undergo an especial education suited to its high func- tion as the people of Revelation, we cannot ignore the importance of the ark in the religion of Israel. As the tables within the ark reminded the Israelite of the supreme importance of moral truth, so the cloud on the mercy- seat above the ark reminded him of a particular mode of the Presence of God Which was vouchsafed to Israel. Year after year, generation after generation, Israel was accustomed to associate the Presence of Him, Whom " the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain," b with a particular spot, a particular outward form, a par- ticular occasional manifestation. Would not this have been leading men's thoughts in an opposite direction to that of the absolute Spirituality and Immateriality of God, unless God had purposed to manifest Himself to man after a manner for which the ark and the Shekinah would be a preparation ? In other words, does not this feature of the religion of Israel only become intelligible when we place it in the light of the Incarnation ? It is clear that a great Apostle was of this mind. a Ps. Ixxxiv. 1-4. b 1 Kings viii. 27. IV] The fame of Ephrcttah. 65 When St. John tells us that " the Word was made flesh, and tabernacled a among us, and we beheld His glory," b we cannot but observe that this language is so chosen as to recall the glory which had rested on the ark of the covenant, and the days when the tabernacle of God had a first place in the thought of Israel. And when the Voice out of the Throne proclaims in the Apocalypse, with reference to our Lord's manifestation in the flesh, " Be- hold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will tabernacle with them," 0 we are led to discern in our Incarnate Saviour a sanction of and response to the yearnings which had been fostered by the Presence on the ark in the tabernacle of Israel. Now, had the ark with its sacred contents, and the Shekinah resting on it, continued to be a leading feature of the furniture of the holy place in the Temple until our Lord's time, there might have arisen in pious minds, trained in the old religion of Israel, a rivalry between the Presence in the ark and the Presence in Jesus of Nazareth — a rivalry such as existed, as we know from the Epistle to the Hebrews, between the still continuing Jewish sacrifices and the Great Sacrifice on Calvary, with its reiterated commemorations in the Church of Christ. But, in point of fact, the distinctive glories of the ark vanished at the destruction of Solo- mon's Temple. In the Temple which was built after the exile, there was, it seems, no ark, no tables of the Law, no Shekinah. The outward structure of Solomon's Temple was copied even in minute details, but the pre- rogative symbols of Divine Presence and authority were wanting to it. Fine architecture cannot atone for de- a effK^viixrev cV rin~v. b St. John i. 14. c Rev. xxi. 3, 'l5ov, T] toO OeoD fitra tSiv avBpdnrwv, iev. f lb. viii. 58. e St. Matt. xi. 27. h St. John xiv. 23. IV] The fame of Ephratah. 69 Mount of Transfiguration, 3, and the cloud which received Him out of the sight of His disciples on the Mount of the Ascension, 6 and His prediction to the high priest, "Hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man . . . coming in the clouds of heaven," c and the warning of His Apostle, " Behold, He cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see Hiin," d — recall one of these. And the other, the " cheru- bims of glory overshadowing the mercy-seat," prepares us for the angels that heralded the Nativity, 6 and for the angels that ministered at the Temptation, 1 and for the great angel of the Agony, s and for the angels of the Sepulchre,' 1 and for the angels who met the men of Galilee after the Ascension, 1 and for Our Lord's own prediction that " the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all His holy angels with Him." j And it was because He thus amply restored all, and more than all, which had been lost to the second Temple, that even at His Birth He was hailed by Jewish believers, like the aged Simeon, as not merely destined to be "a Light to lighten the Gentiles," but also and especially to be " the Glory " — in the ancient sense of that word, which applied it to the Shekinah — " of His people Israel." k IV. The history of the ark, and that particular chapter of it, too, to which the text refers, suggests one more point for consideration. It was natural that the Israelites should be deeply impressed with the mysterious power attaching to the ark of the covenant, and should assume ■ St. Matt. xvii. 5. b Acts i. 9. c St. Mark xiv. 62. a Rev. i. 9. c St. Luke i. 26-38 ; ii. 9-14. f St. Matt. iv. II. * St. Luke xxii. 43. h St. Matt, xxviii. 2 ; St. Luke xxiv. 4. 1 Acts i. 10, 11. i St. Matt. kxv. 31. k St. Luke ii. 32. /O The fame of Ephratah. [Seem. that it would be in all circumstances guarded against outrage. From this it was but a step to ask the question, Can we not make use of it for other purposes than that for which it was given, namely, to be a representation in the midst of Israel of the Presence, the Sanctity, the Mercy of God ? Can we not, for instance, make it an engine of offensive or defensive war; so that tbe enemies of Israel shall quail before a Might that is more than human ? It was an evil hour when, after their defeat by the Philistines at Ebenezer, the leaders of the forces of Israel bethought themselves of this expedient. Wherefore bath the Lord smitten us to-day before the Philistines? Let us fetch the ark of the covenant of the Lord out of Shiloh to us, that, when it cometh among us, it may save us out of the band of our enemies." a The ark came, as we know, attended by the dissolute sons of Eli ; b the loud acclamations in the camp of Israel on its arrival carried terror for a moment into the hearts of Israel's enemies. 0 But, in the event, Israel was defeated with a greater slaughter than before ; and the ark fell into the hands of the pagan conquerors.* 1 The name of Ichabod, born at this sad crisis in the national history, marked the true character of the calamity : " the glory had departed from Israel." 8 And in after ages inspired Hebrew poets told bow God, in His displeasure at Israel's false worships, forsook the tabernacle in Silo, even the tent which He had pitched among men ; and how He delivered their power into captivity, and their beauty into the enemies' hand. f The Jews committed the same mistake when they made up their minds that the promised Messiah would be a person who could be made useful for political objects ■ i Sum. iv. 3. b lb. 4. c lb. 6-8. d lb. io, 11. e lb. 19-21. f Ps. lvvyiii. 61, 62. IV] The fame of Ephratali. 7i which were ardently desired by the nation. One main reason for the rejection of our Lord, in "Whom the predic- tions of a Messiah were really satisfied, was His declara- tion that His kingdom was not of this world, a and that therefore He could not be turned to account in this way. The most pathetic instance of this illusion occurred after the destruction of Jerusalem, when the aged Eabbi Akiba, perhaps the greatest doctor of the Jewish schools, pro- claimed the insurgent Barchochebas the true Messiah. At the head of 200,000 warriors, Barchochebas shook the Roman authority in Syria to its foundations; but the generals of the Emperor Hadrian reduced him to submis- sion, after a terrific slaughter of his followers, and the Rabbi Akiba was put to a death of torture which almost obliterates the memory of his mistakes. Are not we Christians guilty of the same fault, Avhen we attempt to use our Creed for purposes of worldly advantage, or imagine that its public profession will screen us from danger, if we engage in doubtful courses of con- duct ? It is easy to carry the ark of God into fields of battle, on which neither combatant can reasonably hope to be in entire accordance with God's Will. In their different Avays Oliver Cromwell and Louis XIV. carried the ark into the wars which they waged against their opponents; and the impression which they left upon men's minds was seen in the reactions which they pro- voked ; in the popular hostility to serious religious strict- ness, which did much to discredit the Restoration, and in the widespread religious indifference which preceded the French Revolution. Religious professions which are in conflict with the general conduct of those who make them, do not defeat the enemies of Religion ; they betray the cause of Reli- a St. John xviii. 36. 72 The fame of Ephratah. [Seem. gion to its enemies. The sacred ark can never be made to fight the world's battles. God punishes the attempt to enlist Him in a cause of which He disapproves ; though in the moment of disaster He knows how to guard His own honour, and how eventually to recover His throne in the hearts of men. " Lo, we heard of the same at Ephratah." So far, then, as the ark of the covenant was concerned, in those more ancient days, it was apparently a false report, suggested perhaps by some pious peasant who was jealous for the honour of the house of David. In those ancient days the glory of Bethlehem undoubtedly paled before that of the city of the woods, Eirjath-jearim. But in view of Him in Whom the ark was to find a living counterpart, the greatest of the descendants of David — David's Son and yet David's Lord a — it was not a false report. Like Caiaphas's prediction, 1 * it lighted unconsciously upon a deeper truth than the speakers thought of; and Ephratah had only to bide its time in order to eclipse the glories, not merely of Eirjath-jearim, but of Zion itself. There, in the outskirts of the Judsean village, in the lowly manger, scooped out, after the fashion of the country, between or beneath the layers of the limestone rock, — there His Mother laid the Divine Saviour of the world. And thither, year by year, for eighteen centuries, in thought and will if not in deed, Christians have sped to join the shepherds and the Eastern sages ; and while they worship, in their Lord Incarnate, the One Man Who has kept inviolate the Eternal Moral Law of God, and in " Whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily," c they offer Him the homage of their hearts and lives. Let us, too, with our tribute of penitence and love, join, if it a St. Mall. xxii. 42, 43. h St. John xviii. 14. c Col. ii. 9. The fame of Ephratah. 73 may be, this great company of pilgrims belonging to so many climes and ages, in our early Communion on Christmas morning. Let us " go into His true tabernacle, and fall low on our knees before His footstool." a " Let us now go even unto Bethlehem-Ephratah, and see this thing which has come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us." b 0 Pa. cxxxii. 7. b St. Luke ii. 15. SERMON V. BORN OF A WOMAN. (CHRISTMAS DAY.) Gal. iv. 4. God sent forth His Son, made of a woman. " TS it not strange," a child once asked his father, "that J- St. Paul should tell us that our Saviour was a born of a woman ? Everybody that I know is born of a woman, and it is hard to see why such a thing should be men- tioned as if it were remarkable." Children, we all of us know, will sometimes take note of truths, or of sides of truth, which, for whatever reason, escape older people. Their minds are not yet worn down or stiffened by a conventional way of looking at things. The world of thought, so far as they come in contact with it, is, like the world of nature, all new ground to them ; they have not yet learned to economize time and toil by concentrating attention on some few leading features, and passing over the rest as practically unimportant. Thus they make suggestions and observations which are, some- times, worth attention, although older people should have failed to make them. Especially in the case of Christian children who have been baptized into Christ, * yev6/xevov in yvvaiK6s. Born of a Woman. 75 and are thus His members, religious truth presents itself with a clearness which is often forfeited by the sins or the carelessness of later life. Samuel still hears the Divine Voice when Eli may no longer hear it. Let us, then, take the question of this child, as at any rate furnishing a guide to thoughts which will not be out of place on the afternoon of Christmas Day. I. " Bom of a woman ! " Surely there is nothing remark- able in this circumstance, if we take human life as we find it. For us men to be "born of a woman" is not merely the rule, it is a rule to which there is no known exception. Since the first parent of our race, no human being lias appeared upon this earth who has not owed the debt of existence to the pain and travail of a human mother. The rule holds equally with the wisest, the strongest, the saintliest. Millions there have been among the sons of men who have been also, by Divine grace, made to become sons of God ; millions who have been born again, and thus have seen the Kingdom of God. But each one of these was first born of a human mother. So that we are constrained to ask why a circumstance which might have been taken for granted should be invested by the Apostle with such prominence in the case of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Surely, the real question is whether, in His case, such a circumstance could have been taken for granted. If St. Paul mentions it thus emphatically, it is because he, at least, does not make such an assumption. If, indeed, the Christ Whom St. Paul loved and served was only a son of God by grace, while by nature He was only and purely a man, then to have said that He was " born of a woman " 7 6 Bom of a Woman. [Seem. would have been an unmeaning truism. But if, in naming Him, St. Paul is thinking of a Being Whose Nature is such as to make any appearance of His in this earthly sphere in a high degree extraordinary, then to say that He was " born of a woman " is to advance an assertion of startling significance. Now, that St. Paul is thinking of such a Being is clear. When St. Paul says, " God sent forth His Son," he uses the same word a as when he says, " God sent forth the Spirit of His Son." b It is a word which does not simply describe the action of God's Providence, whereby He places a being on the scene of created life ; it implies a sending forth from the inmost Essence, from the very depths of Deity Itself, of One Who shared the very Nature of the Sender. The Son of God, Whom God sent forth, and Who was born of a woman, was God's own Son, not by grace but by nature ; not as being begotten after a lapse of ages, but as, before all worlds, God of God ; the Son of God, in a sense unshared by any other, because not other or less than God the Son. That this is St, Paul's true mind is plain, if we only consider that account of the Son of God which occurs at the beginning of the Epistle to the Colossians. " He is the Image of the Invisible God, the Firstborn of all creation : for in Him were all things created in Heaven and on earth, things visible and things invisible : all things have been created by Him, and for Him : and He is before all things, and in Hira all things consist." 0 And to say that such a Being as this was born of a woman, is certainly not a truism ; it is not an assertion which we should have been prepared to accept unless we were assured of it on sufficient, that is to say, Divine authority. For it means nothing else or less than the " eJcwreVTeiAe. b Gal, iv. 6. c Col. i. 15-17. Bom of a Woman. 77 union of things utterly apart from each other ; the union of the Immaterial with matter ; the union of the Infinite with the finite ; the union of a creature with the Creator. What was the purpose of this union ? We shall best answer that question if we ask another : What was the great trouble of the human soul before Christ our Lord came among us ? Surely it was the practical inaccessi- bility of God. The first truth which was revealed to Israel, and which protected the true idea of God in the mind of Israel, was that " in the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth." a This is a truth which, from the nature of the case, could only come by revelation ; no man or angel ever witnessed the creation out of nothing. The effect of this truth was to reveal God as having a double relation to the universe. He is, first of all, its Owner; Who has, as such, an absolute disposal of it. He is, secondly, Himself entirely distinct from it. This is the most striking of the two truths implied in the Creation ; the profound, im- passable, immeasurable gulf between the Creator and His work. The old paganism was always linking God to Nature, or burying Him in Nature. In ancient Greece, every river, every wood, had its attendant deities ; in India, the dawn, the sun, the earth, were worshipped as instinct with Divinity ; in the great plain of Chalda3a, the heavenly host, or later, the element of fire ; in Phoenicia, the pro- ductive powers of Nature. Israel, indeed, knew that "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handy-work." b But in Israel, faith in God as the Creator made it impossible to confound Him with the work of His Hands. For Israel, He was " the High and Holy One, that inhabiteth Eternity ; " ° He was beyond * Gen. i. I. h Ps. xix. i. c Isa. lvii. 15. 78 Bom of a Woman. [Serm. Nature ; beyond human thought and aspiration ; He was remote, awful, in a higher than the literal sense " making the clouds His chariot, and flying upon the wings of the wind." 8 Certainly, before our Lord came, much took place from time to time to remind men that God had dealings with the human family. The miraculous occurrences which at intervals are so conspicuous in the history of Israel ; the appearances to Abraham ; the Shekinah ; the series of prophetic visions; — these were all intended to teach men, among other things, that God had not left them to them- selves. But still the cry of Israel was, " 0 God, why art Thou absent from us so long ? " b " Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down ! " c or of believers beyond the frontiers of Israel : " Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even unto His seat! . . . Behold, I go forward, but He is not there ; and backward but I cannot perceive Him." d As human inquiry, when Jew and Greek had met at Alexandria, felt more and more eagerly after the transcendental and absolute Being, living in a life of unruffled and majestic calm, beyond the perpetual flux and disturbance whether of created thought or of created matter ; so God seemed to become more and more abstract and unattainable. More and more did He seem to elude the importunate search of the human understanding, while He said less and less to the yearnings of the human heart. This, then, was a first object with the Eternal Son when He was " born of a woman ; " He willed to put Himself within reach of His creatures. He willed to give a palpable proof of the saying that " His delights are with the sons of men." e He, the Immaterial, became related 1 Ps. civ. 5 ; xviii. io. b lb. lxxiv. i. 0 Is. lxiv. i. " Job xxiii. 3, 8. e Prov. viji. 31. Bom of a Woman. 79 intimately and for ever to a material body ; He, the Infinite, condescended to take a finite form ; He, the Creator, entered into indissoluble alliance with the work of His Hands. And thus, as St. John wrote in ecstasy, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which Ave have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life ; (for the Life was manifested, and we have seen It, and bear witness, and show unto you that Eternal Life, Which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us ;) That Which we have seen and heard declare we unto you." a The remote, abstract, inaccessible God was really within reach ; He was " the Word made Flesh ; " b He was seen and handled; He was laid in the manger of Bethlehem. Yes ! it has been said, you Christians may be right in teaching some sort of Incarnation; your doctrine certainly does more justice to the idea of God than the arid con- ception of isolated, unapproachable Deity ; it is an im- provement on the idea of an omnipotent watchmaker, who makes his watch and then leaves it to work as best it may. But your mistake lies in supposing God to be incarnate only in a single Human Form. He is really incarnate, as Schelling has said, in the human race. Humanity is the true son of God, the true veil of the Eternal Word ; and this sublime representation must not be dwarfed down to the New Testament idea of an Incarnation only in Jesus of Nazareth. Now, here, it is obvious to remark, first of all, that if God is incarnate in the human race as a w hole, the human race is quite unaccountably unconscious of its high prero- gative. For the most part, when it has not forgotten or misconceived Him altogether, it has conceived of Him as infinitely distant from it, as hopelessly, disastrously, out of ■ i St. John i. 1-3. » St. John i. 14. 8o Born of a Woman. [Seem. its reach. But, apart from this, just consider what an Incarnation in the human race means. It means the intimate and voluntary union of the All-holy with a race steeped in moral evil. If one fact is certain from revelation and experience, it is that all have sinned ; a it is that there is none righteous, no, not one ; b it is that the human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." This is the witness, not only of Jewish Prophets and of Christian Apostles, but also of heathen sages and poets, who betray indirectly when they do not directly express their sense of the evil that surrounds them. And is it conceivable that He, Who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity,' 1 did yet really make Himself one with a nature still impregnated with evil ? Was the humanity which lied, and shed blood, and revelled, and imbruted itself in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Chaldaea, in imperial Rome, the true robe of the Infinitely Holy ? Can we suppose that He is thus Himself primarily and directly responsible for all the crimes which constitute the staple of human history ; that He is, in fact, not so much the Redeemer from sin as the original sinner? No; if an Incarnation was to take place in which God's Purity was to be safe- guarded, He must select one from among the race, who might truly represent it, and yet be free from its pollutions. And " God sent forth His Son," not when He created the human family, but " when the fulness of the time was come ; " and His Son was born of one human being ; " born of a woman." " Born of a woman ! " The words have a yet more precise meaning ; they do not merely affirm, they deny : a Bom. iii. 23. b Jb. 10. c Jer. xvii. 9. d Hab. i. 13. V] Bom of a Woman. 81 their silence is as exclusive as their positive import is significant. Nothing is said of another earthly parent ; no human father is named as the instrument of Divine Providence ; the Apostle is thinking, we may assert with confidence, of our Lord's Birth of a Virgin-Mother. As we say in the Creed, " He was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary." It has been observed, especially in modern times, that there is no clear reference to the miraculous Conception of our Lord in the writings of St. Paul ; and it must be allowed that, considering the extent of these writings, and the great importance of the fact, this is remark- able. But it will be also noted, first, that there is no one occasion in his writings on which such a reference would seem to be, at least, logically imperative, or even needful, in order to strengthen the writer's position ; while, on the other hand, St. Luke's Gospel, which was written under St. Paul's direction, and which from first to last illustrates all that is distinctive in his teaching, gives the fullest account of the circumstances of our Lord's Conception and Birth which we have in the New Testa- ment. It is reasonable, then, to conclude that the word " woman " in this place is emphatic ; it not merely tells us that our Lord condescended to be born of an earthly parent, but it also implies, very pointedly, that He had only one parent, — His Blessed Mother. In considering our Lord's Birth of a Virgin-Mother, we have always to remember that it was a first necessity that the Bedeemer of mankind should be sinless. If He was to help our race out of its tradition of moral degra- dation, He must have no part in the evil which it was His work to put away. " Such an High Priest became us, Who is holy, harmless, undefilcd, separate from sinners." 11 e Hub. vii. 26. P 82 Bom of a Woman. [Seem. But, then, human sin Mas not merely actual, but original. It was not merely a result of each man's separate life and responsibility, but, in consequence of the withdrawal after Adam's transgression of God's first gift of righteousness, it was a warp of the human will, a dulness of the human affections and intelligence, a subtle ingredient of the common character. It was a tradition, gathering volume and intensity as it passed down the centuries ; it was an entail, from the obligations of which successive genera- tions could not escape. Men have constantly resented, as they resent to-day, the idea of such an inheritance of evil. But they act, at least in social and public matters, upon the presumption that it is true. Man is ever on his guard against his brother-man, as though he were a disguised or possible enemy. Society protects itself by laws against human nature ; its laws would be a gratuitous and insulting libel if human nature were by iDstinct, and originally, sinless. Thus for the apparition of a sinless Being, truly sharing in our common nature, yet absolutely free from its inheritance of evil, some striking irregularity in the transmission of natural life, some flaw, couspicuous and intentional, was plainly suitable, in order to mark the entrance upon the earthly scene of One Who shared in the tradition of flesh and blood, without sharing in the tradition of sin. This was the meaning of our Lord's Birth of a Virgin- Mother ; it was because "He became sin for us, Who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him," a that He was, in this emphatic and exclusive sense, " born of a woman." But there is another aspect of this circumstance which, among some which must be passed over, claims especial notice to-day. The position of women in the ancient world was, generally, one of deep degradation. There are * 2 Cor. v. 21. V] Born of a Woman. 83 some great and saintly women in ancient Israel ; Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Huldah. There are women who are socially or politically great in paganism, without being saintly ; Semiramis, Aspasia, Sappho, some wives or mothers of the Caesars. But, as a rule, in antiquity women were degraded. They were at the mercy of the caprice and the passions of men ; they lived, as they generally live to-day in the Moslem East, a sickly life, in which the luxuries of a petted seclusion scarcely disguise the hard realities of their fate. Yet, then, as now, women were the larger part of the human family ; and one object of the Divine Incarnation was to put woman's life on a totally new footing within the precincts of the Church of the redeemed. This was done when the Redeemer Himself, God's own Eternal Son, owning no earthly father, yet deigned to be " born of a woman." The highest honours ever attained by or bestowed upon the noblest or the saintliest members of the stronger sex, surely pale into insignificance when they are contrasted with the altogether unique prerogative of Mary. She herself, in the Hymn of the Incarnation, is already con- scious of this. Let us think of the best man or woman we have ever known in life, and ask ourselves if it would be possible for him or her to say, without presumption or absurdity, " Behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed." a But Mary utters these words, and Christendom verifies them from age to age. To have been the Mother of the Divine Redeemer is a privilege unshared and incommunicable, and it sheds a glory upon all Christian women to the end of time. It is this fact which has silently created that rare and beautiful feeling in Christendom, which in the Middle Ages became chivalry, but which is wider and more lasting than to be identified " St. Luke i. 48. 84 Bom of el Woman. [Seem. with any one age of the Church's life. Without the aid of legislation, without reducing itself to a theory or a philosophy, this feeling insensibly corrected the wrongs of centuries, and secured for women that tender respect and deference which is the true safeguard of tbeir com- manding influence, and which alone secures it. "We have lived on into a time when this feature of our Christian civilization seems to be for the moment im- perilled. "We are told that the condition of woman in Christendom is one of undue subjection ; and efforts are being made to place her, in a new sense, on an equality with man, by giving her a man's education, a man's tastes, a man's ambitions, a man's occupations, a man's character. The difference between these modern efforts to improve the condition of women, and that of our Divine Redeemer when He entered this world as the San of a Virgin- Mother, is that He respected the characteristic virtues and graces of the sex, while persons in our day imperil or sacrifice them. It is easier to produce an occasional Catharine de Medici of France, or a Catharine II. of Eussia, than a St. Agnes, or a St. Monica, or a Eugenie de Guerin, or a Hannah More. It is easier to unsex woman, by making her man's rival in the struggle of life, and a pallid caricature of masculine self-assertion, than to develop those qualities of purity, modesty, self-devotion, in which her highest power and excellence consist. The new friends of woman are not her best friends ; they are tempting her to engage in a rivalry with man on his own ground, in which she must ultimately be worsted. Mary, the meekest and lowliest of maidens, is also the very first of women ; nay, in her office, she is the very first of human beings who are only human ; and it is her sweetness, her grace, her modesty, which so admirably adorn her rank. As St. Paul says, in a passage which has been misunderstood, V] Bom of a Woman. 85 woman is saved by " the Child-bearing ; " that is to say, by the Birth^of the Divine Child of His Virgin-Mother. a Depend on it, my brethren, the best guarantee of woman's liberty and influence is to be found in the fact that the Eternal Son deigned to be born of a woman. III. " Born of a woman ! " The words suggest one further consideration ; they bring before us God's Everlasting Son entering into the life of a human family by becoming one of its members. The life of the family is, indeed, older than Christianity ; it is grounded on facts and in- stincts of nature ; it is, in the last analysis, the product of the action of man's reason and conscience upon his rudimentary natural instincts. But the nature and sacredness of family life has been recognized with very different degrees of clearness in different ages and coun- tries of the world. It has had to contend with selfish passions always threatening to break it up, and, in par- ticular, with the widespread and degrading institution of polygamy. Those who have best understood the true well-being of our race have ever laboured to uphold family life as the safeguard of personal purity, and as the firmest foundation of social order. Now, when our Lord condescended to be born of a woman, He became a member of a human family, and He bestowed upon family life the greatest consecration it has ever received since the beginning of human history. He had, indeed, no earthly father, but He was subject to His foster- father St. Joseph, as to His own Mother Mary ; He was subject while He blessed them. In every age Christians have loved to dwell upon the picture of that incomparable * 1 Tim. ii. 15, Sict rrjs Teicvoyovlas. Cf. Ellicott, in loo. 86 Born of a Woman. [Serm. home, first at Bethlehem and then at Nazareth ; that home in which Mary presided, and for which Joseph toiled, and in which Jesus was nursed and trained. No homestead, we may be sure, ever rivalled the moral beauties of that which was set up on earth when the Son of God was born of a woman. From that day to this He has been the inspiring, regulating, combining Influence in all Christian households. In the Christian father, we trace His moral authority ; in the Christian mother, His tenderness and love ; in the Christian child, His lowly obedience. He sweetened and consecrated family life for all time, when He deigned to enter it by being " born of a woman." And hence we may see why it is that Christmas is the most popular festival of the Church in those coun- tries in which the family is, to all appearance, strongest. It is notably more popular in England than in France, and nowhere throughout Christendom more popular than in England. Such predilections are decided by the un- reasoning instinct of nations ; an instinct which neverthe- less has a reason of its own. We know that in the later years of our Lord's earthly life, when His day of public work was come, He sat easily to family ties. He would not allow them to interfere with more sacred and constraining duties. " Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business ? " a were the first words which marked the approach of this new period. And the day came when He left His home, His Mother, His foster-father, His cousins, and when He could even ask, " Who is My mother, and who are My brethren?" b These later phases and moods of His Human Life, when it was detached, in a painful and sublime isolation, from the dearest ties of home and kindred, have always their lessons, stern yet sweet, for predestined souls. But, for 0 St. Luke ii. 49. I St. Matt. xii. 48. V] Born of a Woman. most of us, that point in the Life of our Lord Jesus Christ at which He became a Member of a human family natu- rally attracts the strongest and most eager interest. The deepest thought in all our Christmas rejoicings, in those meetings of families which never meet save once in the year, is that when the Son of God deigned to come into our world, it was in appearance as the weakest and most dependent Member of a human family, yet as the true Consecrator and Upholder of family life. One of the many blessings of Christmas is that it draws families together. Those who can meet, do meet ; those who cannot meet, exchange greetings of affection and kindliness. In this work, the moral and social value of which no thought- ful person will underrate, women discharge a far higher and more effective part than men. The Prince of Peace — the Healer of our wounds, personal, domestic, religious, social — sent forth from the Father, is " born of a woman." In promoting this work, women cannot well overrate their power ; they may easily think too cheaply of their oppor- tunities. Few, if any, women have not some work of this kind ready to their hands to do; they will find their happiness and their sense of capacity greatly enhanced by doing it. Sermons, we all know, are not always welcome on the great festivals of the Christian Church ; they make too large a demand on Christian feeling. The really critical events in a family history are better thought over than talked about, at least at the time of their occurrence. And thus, when Advent is over, we may long to spend Christmas, so far as may be, in prayer and praise ; to talk with our Incarnate Lord instead of being talked to about Him by one of His creatures. Be it so, my brethren ; but let us be sure that if Chris- tian feeling is too sensitive easily to bear with the intrusions 88 Bom of a Woman. of human language, it is, when healthy and sincere, never incapable of expressing itself in work. Let not this bright week, consecrated throughout to the Nativity of our Lord, pass without our each doing some one work of mercy and self-sacrifice, to His praise and glory, Who for the love of us deigned to become Man. Some poor family may be clothed or fed ; some sore and broken heart may be comforted; some unwelcome duty, which will lighten another's burden, perhaps save his health from premature decay, may be cheerfully undertaken. If any should need some definite suggestion, we may send something to the Fund for the Irish Ladies in Distress ; or we may help, accordiug to our power, the noble Mission of the Universities in Central Africa. There are abundant opportunities of kindly service. Only let us keep our eye fixed on Him Whom the Father sent forth, and Who was born of a woman, and there will be no question, for any long time, what to do or how to do it. SERMON VI. BORN OF A VIRGIN. (SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS.) St. Matt. i. 22, 23. Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which icas spoken of the Lord by the Prophet, saying, Behold, a Virgin shall be with Child, and shall bring forth a Son, and they shall call His Name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. MANY readers of the Bible must be struck by the reason which St. Matthew here gives for the occurrences connected with the Birth of Christ : " All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the Prophet." Perhaps we whisper to ourselves that the event predicted is, after all, more important than the prediction ; and that it would have been more natural to say that the prophecy existed for the sake of the event, than the event for the sake of the prophecy ; that Isaiah's utterance was meant to prepare the world for Jesus Christ, than that the Birth of Jesus Christ was designed to justify Isaiah. But, in truth, both the prophecy and its fulfil- ment were from God ; and the independent and higher importance of the event is not inconsistent with its being also a certificate of the Prophet's accuracy. There were other reasons, no doubt, for the Birth of Jesus Christ of 90 Born of a Virgin. [Serm. a Virgin-Mother ; but one reason for it was that it was already foretold on Divine authority. And it fell in with St. Matthew's general plan throughout his Gospel, to insist on this particular reason. He wrote for Churches consisting almost entirely of converts from Judaism ; and he is concerned, at almost every step of his narrative, to show that the Life of Jesus, in all its particulars, corre- sponded to the statements of Jewish prophecy, as under- stood by the Jews themselves, respecting the coming Messiah. So he begins at the beginning, with the Birth of Christ ; and he says that Jesus was born just as Isaiah had said that Christ would be born, and, among other reasons, because Isaiah had said so. Those first Jewish Christians might feel wonder, even scandal, when first they heard of the embarrassment of St. Joseph, and of the Angelic assurances; but they had only to open the roll of prophecy to find that the history had been accurately anticipated. " All this was done, that it might be ful- filled which was spoken of the Lord by the Prophet, say- ing, Behold, a Virgin shall be with Child, and shall bring forth a Son, and they shall call His Name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, Cod with us." In St. Matthew's eyes, then, Isaiah is almost as much the his- torian as he is the Prophet of our Lord's Nativity. But is it clear that when Isaiah uttered the words which are quoted he meant to predict such an event as St. Matthew records ? It has been suggested that this was not really Isaiah's meaning; that Isaiah had in view some other event, at once nearer to his own times, and more commonplace and ordinary than the Birth of the Kedeemer ; and that St. Matthew accommodates the Prophet's language, by a gentle pressure, to the necessities of the supernatural account which he is himself narrating. And a main VI] Born of a Vii'gin. 9i reason which is urged for this view of Isaiah's meaning is, that if we look to the circumstances under which his pro- phecy was uttered, it is difficult to think that so distant an event as the Birth of Messiah would have at all served his purpose in giving a sign to Ahaz. What, then, were the circumstances which led Isaiah to proclaim, " Behold, a Virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His Name Emmanuel " ? a Ahaz, the King of Judah, was besieged in his capital by the allied forces of Israel and Syria, under their kings Pekah and Rezin. These kings were really leagued against the rising empire of Assyria; but they thought that they would best consolidate their own power in Palestine by deposing the reigning family of David from the throne of Jerusalem and setting up a vassal monarch, "the son of Tabeal," b on whose services they could reckon in the approaching struggle with Assyria. Isaiah, with his son, was sent to encourage Ahaz to make a stout resistance, and to assure him that, notwithstanding the project of the allied kings, God would be faithful to His covenant with David. These associated kings, Isaiah says, need occasion Ahaz no anxiety ; they were like brands that are nearly burnt out; there was no Divine force in Syria, and no political future for Israel. Ahaz had only to trust God ; all would be well. Ahaz was silent ; silent because suspicious and distrust- ful. And then Isaiah bade him ask for some token which might assure him of God's presence with and good will towards him. " Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God ; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above." c Had Ahaz then asked for a token of God's good will towards him- self personally, or his immediate descendants, it would, no doubt, have been granted But Ahaz was bent upon ■ Lsa. Til. 14. * lb. 6. c lb. 11. 9 2 Born of a Virgin. [Serm. an irreligious policy of his own ; he thought that, by the aid of Assyria, he would be able to do without the God and the religion of his ancestors ; he looked on God and His Prophets as personal enemies who thwarted his plans ; and he did not wish, by asking for a sign, to commit him- self to a religious creed and system with which, he hoped, he had parted company for ever. Yet Ahaz, standing before the Prophet, could not refuse to say anything; he must accept or decline the invitation to ask for a sign. He declined to do so ; and, as irreligious people often do in like circumstances, he pleaded a religious scruple as the reason for his refusal. The old Law had warned Israel against tempting the Lord by asking for new evidences or "signs " of such truth as was already sufficiently attested ; n and Ahaz, who had resorted freely to the forbidden arts of necromancy gravely produced this entirely insincere reason to account for his resolve : " I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord." b Then it was that Isaiah spoke, not without some righteous anger, to King Ahaz. " Hear ye now, ye house of David ; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign.'"' A sign would be given, but Ahaz could now no longer determine its drift and character. It would show that God would be true to His promises to David ; but it would afford scant encourage- ment to the personal ambitions of the degenerate de- scendants of the man after God's own heart. The earthly throne of David might perish ; but the promise of un- failing empire made to David would still be safe, though it would be fulfilled in a distant age, and by unthought- of agencies. Just as Moses was assured that God had sent him, by the sign of a future deliverance from Egypt, k Dent. vi. 16. b Isa. 12. c lb. 13. VI] Born of a Virgin. 93 which at the time seemed impossible ; a so religious J ews of Isaiah's clay, for whom Isaiah was really speaking, were to be assured of the safety of the great religious interests entrusted to the House of David, by a sign or predicted wonder, without parallel in history, but designed to convince them that God might punish the rebellious kings of Judah, and yet work out the pro- mised salvation of Israel and the human race. " Behold," Isaiah cries, as he gazes across the centuries at the picture which passes before him — " Behold, the Virgin " — the lan- guage shows that he is thinking of one in particular — " is with Child, and beareth a Son, and shall call His Name Emmanuel." b It was, then, no part of Isaiah's plan to give a sign which should assure Ahaz of present deliverance ; he had done that before in plain language. And when he utters the prophecy quoted by St. Matthew, he has other and higher objects before him, the nature of which must be determined, not by the real or supposed state of mind of Ahaz, but by the natural force of the Prophet's words. Here, then, let us consider the importance of the event to which Isaiah thus looks forward, and which the Evangelist describes as fulfilled. I. This importance is seen, first of all, in the strictly pre- ternatural character of the occurrence itself. " Behold, a Virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son." The foil to this prediction is the universal law, by which our race is transmitted, that a child must have two human parents. St. Matthew is explicit in his account of the events which preceded our Lord's Birth; but it has been contended * Exod. iii. 12. b Isa. vii. 14. 94 Born of a Virgin. [Seem. that the word* which Isaiah uses, and which is translated " virgin," may mean a young but married woman. If this were the meaning, it is difficult to see why there should be any allusion to the mother at all, siuce the predicted child would only be born like all other children, and would not be a sign in the Prophet's sense. But the Hebrew word for " virgin " is used of Eebekah b before her marriage with Isaac ; of Miriam, 0 the maiden sister of the infant Moses ; and in five other places d in which it is found in the Old Testament there is no reasonable ground for thinking that any but unmarried women are meant. I do not forget the names of scholars who, moved apparently by extraneous considerations, have disputed the accuracy of the authorized translation ; but one fact in connection with it is instructive, and may throw a great deal of light upon more recent criticism. \ When the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was made, some two centuries at the least before our Lord, in Alexandria, and nothing was supposed to be at stake, the Jewish translators rendered this word of Isaiah's by " virgin." 6 But when, in the second century of our era, Aquila, a Jewish proselyte of Sinope, haviug his eye upon the Christian appeal to Jewish prophecy, undertook a new translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, he rendered it by "a young woman."' If in our day the point could be decided by the natural force of language, without reference to the claims of Christianity or the * Etymologically, nn^j? may mean a marriageable maiden (D^V, adole- zcere) ; but in the Old Tesfament there is no proof of its being applied to any but the unmarried. To determine the sense of such words by that which they, or their roots, bear in the cognate dialects, is a common source of error. b Gen. xxiv. 43. c Exod. ii. S. a 1 Chron. xv. 20 ; Ts. Ixviii. 25 ; Trov. xsx. 19 ; Song of Sol. i. 3 ; vi. 8. c LXX., -wapBivos. { vtavis, Aquila. VI] Bom of a Virgin. 95 possibility of the preternatural, there would not be much doubt upon the subject. For Christians, who bow to the authority of the Gospel, there can be no doubt. After describing our Lord's Birth of a Virgin-Mother, St. Matthew adds, " Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the Prophet, saying, Behold, a Virgin shall be with Child, and shall bring forth a Son." If the Prophet whom St. Matthew quotes said nothing about a " Virgin," but was only predicting a marriageable maiden, and a natural birth, St. Matthew's quotation is not only irre- levant ; it is an attempt, by means of a false translation, to claim for his narrative the sanction of prophecy. If we are not prepared to say that the ignorance or the bad faitl) of the Evangelist is fatal to his authority as a religious teacher, we must continue to read the Prophet as our forefathers read him ; we must believe him to have foretold that Emmanuel would be born of a Virgin-Mother. The Birth of Jesus Christ is not unfrequently discussed in our clay, as the birth of a great man, but without reference to the virginity of His Mother. Isaiah's predic- tion and St. Matthew's narrative are passed over, as if they were not of much importance to our estimate of the event. My brethren, it is necessary to say plainly that the account in the Gospel is either true or false. If it is false, it ought to be repudiated by honest men as a baseless superstition. If, as we Christians believe, it is true, then it is a very momentous truth ; it implies a great deal more than is to be expressed by saying that the Son of the Virgin was a great or extraordinary Man ; it carries us beyond the limits of nature and ordinary experience. Doubtless, here aud there in the heathen world, there were legends of sages or pcets who were born of virgins ; 9 6 Born of a Virgin. [Serm. but these legends are related to the history of our Saviour's Birth, as are false to true miracles. As the counterfeit miracle implies the real miracle of which it is a counterfeit, so the idea of a virgin-birth, here and there discoverable in paganism, points to a deep instinct of the human race, and to a high probability that the Absolute Keligion would satisfy it. Men felt, pagans though they were, the oppression and degradation of their hereditary nature ; they longed for some break in the tyrannical tradition of flesh and blood ; they longed for the appearance of some being who should still belong to them, yet in a manner so exceptional as to be able to inaugurate a new era in humanity. Kevelation, surely, is not less trustworthy because it recognizes an instinct which only led men to do it justice, and which was in accordance with moral truth. II. For here we touch upon a primary reason for our Lord's preternatural Birth. If He was to raise us from our degra- dation, He must Himself be sinless; a sinless Example and a sinless Sacrifice. Our Lord Himself and His Apostles abundantly insist upon this His sinlessness ; a but how was it to be secured if He was indeed to become incorporate with a race which was steeped in a tradition of evil ? When, by his transgression, our first parent had forfeited the robe of grace in which God had clothed him in Paradise, he passed on to his descendants a nature so im- poverished, as to be biassed in a wrong direction ; thence- forth evil had the upper hand in human nature. It descended, like a bad name or a disease, from generation to generation ; and though here or there, as with Jeremiah b n St. Johu viii. 46; 2 Cor. v. 21 ; 1 St. Pet. ii. 22. b Jer. i. 5. VI] Born of a Virgin. 97 or the Baptist," there was a special sanctification before birth, yet the millions of mankind had to say with David, " Behold, I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin hath my mother conceived me." h How, then, was this fatal entail to be cut off so decisively that all should understand the enfranchisement ? The Birth of a Virgin was the answer to that question. The Virgin's Son was still human ; but in Him humanity had inherited no part of that bad legacy which came across the ages from the Fall. And truly, " such an High Priest became us, holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners." c This, indeed, as you will have anticipated, is not the whole account of the matter. The Birth of Jesus Christ, as we Christians believe, marked the entrance into the sphere of sense and time of One Who had already existed from eternity. At His Birth, as St. Paul says, He was " manifested in the flesh ; " d but whether in this passage He is called God or not, the Apostle's words at the least imply that our Lord existed before His manifestation in time. The Father " sent forth His Son, made of a woman," as St. Paul again tells us in the Epistle for to-day . e But the Son existed before He was sent forth ; the expression is evidently chosen to imply this. And this previous existence did not date from creation; for "in the begin- ning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." £ How was the entrance of such a Being into this our world so to be marked as to show that He did not originally owe existence to a human parent ? We could not have dared to answer such a question beforehand ; but we can see how it is answered by our Lord's Birth of ■ St. Luke i. 15. b Ps. li. 5. c Heb. vii. 26. d 1 Tim. iii. 16 ; cf. pp. 108, 109. e Sunday after Christmas Day : Gal. iv. 4. ' St. Jolm i. 1. G 9§ Bom of a Virgin. [SERMV a Virgin. Was it not natural that Nature should thus suspend her laws to welcome the approach and the blessing of her Maker ? III. The significance of our Lord's Birth of a Virgin-Mother may also be gathered from its results. At this distance of time we can. see that no other birth, since the beginning of history, has involved such impor- tant consequences to the human race. We Christians have had nearly nineteen centimes in which to form comparisons and to arrive at conclusions. We have had time to take the measure of the great statesmen, soldiers, poets, teachers, who have been foremost among mankind. Who of them all has left behind him a work which can compare with that achieved by Jesus Christ ? Napoleon L once set himself to contrast the empires of Alexander, of Caesar, and his own, with that of our Lord and Saviour. Theirs were transient, His is lasting ; theirs had reached a limit, His is ever extending ; theirs were based on force, His is based on convictions. Who, again, of the great men of letters has swayed the world like Jesus Christ ? Doubt- less they, too, have an empire. Who can dispute the influence at this hour of Plato, of Shakespeare, of Bacon ? But it is an influence which differs in kind from His : they only interest the intellect, while He subdues the will. Nay, compare Him with the great teachers of false religions ; with Sakya-Mouni, who preceded, or with Mohammad, who followed Him. Certainly Buddhism out- numbers Christendom ; and we cannot deny the activity of Islam in certain portions of the Eastern world. But these religions are the religions of races with no real future. Christianity is the Creed of the nations which year by year are more and more controlling the destinies VI] Bom of a Virgin. 99 of our race. And if it be urged that large portions of the European nations, Christian by profession, are now abjuring Christianity, it may be replied that such an apostasy will not last. Man cannot dispense with Re- ligion; and when he has come into contact with the highest type of Eeligion, he has thereby exhausted the religious capacities of his nature ; the Absolute Religion makes any other impossible for free and sincere minds. The present efforts to replace Christianity by an imaginary religion of the future, distilled out of all the positive religions of the world, is doomed to a failure only less complete than the attempt to replace it by mere negations. There are not wanting signs of a rebound towards the Faith ; there are no signs whatever of a rising religious force capable of superseding it. Mean- while, all that is best and most full of hope in the civilized world dates from the Birthday of Jesus Christ. Doubt- less we owe to the old pagan days some things which rank high in the order of nature. We owe philosophy to Greece, and law and well-ordered life to Rome. But the idea of progress, which, however it may have been mis- applied, is perhaps the most fertile and energetic idea in modern public life, is a creation of the Christian Creed. It springs from these high hopes for the future, whether of individuals or of the race, which Christ has taught His disciples to entertain, out of pure loyalty to Himself. And such institutions as hospitals, which make life toler- able for the suffering classes, that is, for the majority of human beings, date, one and all, from the appearance of Jesus Christ, and from the principles which He proclaimed to men with sovereign authority. To take one point among many, the position of women in Christian society is directly traceable, not only to our Lord's teaching, but to the circumstances of His Birth. IOO Bom of a Virgin. [Seem. Before He came, woman, even in Israel, was little better than the slave of man ; in the heathen world, as in Eastern countries now, she was a slave, to all intents and purposes. Here and there a woman of great force of cha- racter, joined to hereditary advantages, might emerge from this chronic oppression ; she might become a Deborah, a Semiramis, a Cleopatra, a Boadicea, or a Zenobia ; she might control the world, or at least its rulers. But the lot of the majority of women was a suffering and degraded one. Now, when Christ took upon Him to deliver man, He did not abhor the Virgiu's womb. In the greatest event in the whole course of human history the stronger sex had no part whatever. The Incarnate Son was conceived of the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary. And there- fore in Mary woman rose to a position of consideration unknown before. Nothing was forfeited that belongs to the true modesty and grace of woman's nature, but the larger share of influence, in shaping the destinies of the Christian races, was secured to her in perpetuity. It was the Incarnation which created chivalry, and all those better features of modern life which are due to it. And surely they are no true friends to the real influence and usefulness of women who would substitute for the Christian ideal of womanhood another, in which she is to compete for awhile with man in all the bustling energy of his public life, and in the end to be relegated to some such social fate as will inevitably follow upon unsuccessful rivalry. But these outward and visible results of the Birth of Christ were far from being the most important. It is onceivable that such results as these might have been due to a religious genius of commanding influence, or to a man invested with miraculous powers, but still alto- gether and only a man. The' Birth of Jesus Christ meant VI] Born of a Virgin. 101 much more than this. It was the entrance of the Word made Flesh into the scene of sense and time ; it was the manifestation of God by His taking our nature upon Him. Before the Incarnation there was a great gulf fixed between God and man. Man could think about God ; he could pray to Him ; he could practise a certain measure of obedience to His Will. But in his best moments man was conscious of his utter separateness from God, as the Perfect Moral Being. He was conscious of sin ; and this meant nothing less than separation from the All-holy. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ was a bridge across the chasm which thus parted earth and Heaven. On the one hand, and from everlasting, Jesus Christ is of one Substance with the Father, Very and Eternal God ; on the other, He was made very Man, of the substance of the Virgin Mary, His Mother. As the Collect says, " He took man's nature upon Him." When He had already existed from Eternity, He folded around Him, and made His own, a created form, a Human Body and a Human Soul, to be for ever united to His Eternal Godhead. Through this His Human Nature He acts, on God's behalf, upon mankind. Through this His Human Nature He pleads for man before the Majesty of God. Thus there is " one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus." a It is as Man that He mediates between the Creator and the creature, between sinners and the All- holy ; but His Godhead secures to His mediation its com- manding power. If He were not Human, we should be unrepresented in Heaven, where He ever liveth to make intercession for us. b If He were not Divine, it would be impossible to say why His Death upon the Cross should have infinite merit ; or why " the Body of Jesus Christ, which was given for us," should now, in the Holy Sacra- * I Tim. ii. 5. » Heb. vii. 25. 102 Born of a Virgin. [Serm. ment, "preserve our bodies and souls unto everlasting life."* As Mediator He is at one and the same moment in the bosom of the Godhead, and in the closest contact with the souls of His redeemed; and this is a result of His entrance, clad in a Created Form, into our human world, being as He is the Everlasting Son, yet withal the Child of Mary. That this is the deepest meaning of Christmas, and of the Birth of Christ, is implied in the Name assigned by prophecy h to the Virgin's Son — the sublime Name, Emmanuel. From the day of the Nativity God was with man, not simply as heretofore, as the Omnipresent, but under new and more intimate conditions. From the day of the Nativity there was a change in the relations between earth and Heaven. To be one with Christ was to be one with God ; and this union with God through Christ is the secret and basis of the new kingdom of souls which Christ has founded, and in which He reigns. Who shall describe the wealth of spiritual and moral power which dates from the appearance of the Incarnate Son in our human world, as our "Wisdom, and Eighteousness, and Sanctification, and Redemption ? " c Here and there we see through the clouds, as though by glimpses, some streaks of the glory of this Invisible Kingdom of souls ; but only in another life shall we understand at all approxi- mately what it has meant for millions of our race. IV. And here, though we are still only on the threshold of the subject, we must note two points in conclusion. i. Observe the contrast between the real and the apparent importance of the Birth of Christ. To human " Words of Administration at the Holy Communion. b Isa. vii. 14. u 1 Cor. i. 30. VI] Bom of a Virgin. sense, the event which took place at Bethlehem may well have seemed at the time commonplace enough. An Infant was born under circumstances of hardship ; in a wayside stable. To those who did not look closely into the circumstances, it might have occurred that a like event had often happened before, and would often be repeated. Everybody did not hear the song of the Angels, or mark the bearing of the Virgin-Mother and of her saintly spouse. The Kingdom of God had entered into history, but certainly " not with observation." a Nay, more, even among the worshippers of Christ the full meaning of His Birth, as opening a new era in the history of the human race, was not at once practically appre- ciated. For five centuries and a half, Christians still reckoned the passing years by the names of the Koman consuls or by the era of Diocletian, just like the pagans around them. It was only in the year 541 that Dionysius the Little, a pious and learned person at Kome, first ranged the history of mankind around the most important event in it — the Birthday of Jesus Christ. Christendom at once recognized the justice of this way of reckoning time ; and no attempts to supersede it, such as that which was made in France during the First Bevolution, have since had a chance of success. But how often do we use the phrase, " the year of our Lord," without reflecting that it proclaims the Birth of Jesus Christ to be an event of such commanding importance that all else in human history, rightly understood, is merely relative to it ; in- teresting only as it precedes or follows, as it leads up to or is derived from it ! Yet, as you know, five centuries and a half passed before this was practically recognized. So it has been ever since ; so it is at this hour. Keal importance is one thing, apparent importance another. a St. Luke xvii. 20. 104 Born of a Virgin. [Serm. The events which move the world are not always those •which men think most noteworthy. The men who most deeply influence their fellows are not those of whom every- body is talking. The currents of thought and feeling which will shape the future are not those which are wel- comed by the organs and interpreters of current opinion. When Christ appeared, the Palace of the Caesar seemed to be more likely to govern the destinies of mankind than the Manger of Bethlehem. No, brethren, depend on it, the apparent is net always, or even generally, the real. 2. The importance of the Birth of Christ must be variously recognized ; by the student of history, by the philosopher, by the divine. But there is one aspect of it which, for you and me, is more pressing than any other. What is its practical importance to us now, and in the approaching future ? Probably every one in this Cathe- dral has said to himself to-day, " This is the last Sunday in 1878." Yes, my friends, the hours of this year are quickly running out ; and as those of us who have reached or have passed middle life look back on it, we are tempted to say, in the phrase of the Psalmist, " I went by, and lo, it was gone ; I sought it, but its place could nowhere be found." a It seems, indeed, but yesterday when we were gathered here at the close of 1 877 ; yet since then how mucli has taken place, how much has there been to think about ! And, after all, thought and occupation are the wings of time. Certainly it has been a year of anxieties, a year of struggles, a year of surprises, a year of achievements, a year in which, whether for good or evil, the nations, as the phrase goes, have been " making history." This is not the hour to discuss it controver- sially ; probably those who come after us will be better a Ps. xxxvii. 37. VI] Bom of a Virgin. able than we to bring a large knowledge and a calm impartiality to the estimate of what it has really been to our country and to the human race. But, as it passes, it leaves us Englishmen with a double burden on our hands ; widespread distress at home, which, according to our means, it should be our care to alleviate ; and one, per- haps two wars, in our dependencies abroad. All who think at all will find in these facts matters for sober and anxious thought ; reasons, it may also be, for serious mis- givings. But, as the year passes, it sweeps away with it into the abyss of history, into the great company of the dead, many whom, in private or in public, we have known so well ; the aged statesman, whose long life had been spent in the ardent struggles of political party ; a the great missionary bishop, who will rank hereafter in a distant colony with our own Augustine ; b the divine, in whom, now that he is gone, men have traced the genius and the spirit of Butler, 0 the ruler of the largest portion of the Church of Christ ; d and, not least, those whom we have most recently mourned — the wife, the Princess, who has shown us how a high station can be consecrated to God by works of charity and benevolence. 0 Yes ! they and many others, nearer, it may be, and dearer to us, are now among the dead ; and as the passing year bears them with it from our sight, we catch a glimpse of those great realities which we too easily, all of us, forget. It is certain that many who prayed and listened in this a The Right Hon. John, Earl Russell, died May 28, 1878. b The Right Rev. Augustus Selwyn, D.D., Bishop of Lichfield, formerly Bishop of New Zealand, died April n, 1S78. c The Rev. J. B. Mozley, D.D., Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and Regius Professor of Divinity, died January 4, 1S78. d Pope Pius IX. died February 27, 1878. e Her Royal Highness the Grand-Duchess of Hesse, Princess Alice Maud Mary of England, died December 14, 1S78. io6 Born of a Virgin. Cathedral on the last Sunday of 1877 have since passed into the presence of the Eternal Judge. It is certain that many who pray and listen here this afternoon will have followed them before the last Sunday of 1879. Which of us it will be, we know not ; but as we think steadily on the undeniable truth, surely some of the mists of our daily thought clear away, and we see things more nearly as they are. In that world there will be no England, but only the souls of Englishmen. In that world there will be no distinctions of race, or rank, or Avealth, or accomplishments, but only the great and the ineffaceable distinction between the saved and the lost. Surely, as from this vantage-point of passing time we look out into that coming world, with its blessed and terrific possibilities, with its glories, its solemnities, its nearness to each one of us, we must take heed that, for each one of us, the Birth of the Redeemer shall mark, ere the sacred week has gone, something more than a mile- stone on the road of life, or the occasion of a family gathering. There is one question which every man here should lose no time whatever in answering, if it be not answered yet : What is my actual relation to Him, Who, for love of me, was conceived of the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary ; my present Redeemer, and my future Judge ? SERMON VII. GOD IN HUMAN FORM. (FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT.) 1 Tim. nr. 16. And without controversy r/reat is the mystery of Godliness : God ivas manifest in the Flesh. AT length the Advent Season has reached its close, and we are at Christmas Eve. The season of expecta- tion is over, and we are almost entering on the hours of that bright Festival which the Christian Church keeps as the Birthday of her Founder ; the day on which the Saviour of the World was born of a human mother, and came to take His place among the things of time, although Himself "the express Image of" the Father's Person, and upholding all things by the word of His Power." 11 And the Apostle's words to Timothy put before us forcibly and concisely the master-truth which gives Christ- mas its meaning. " Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh." To-morrow is not merely the birthday of a sage or a philanthropist. It is the entrance into our human world of One Who is at once its Architect and its Judge, under conditions, too, which make Him the peer of the poorest ■ Heb. i. 3. io8 God in Human Form. [Serm. among us. It is the introduction of a new principle of life into humanity which we thus commemorate ; a new starting-point in the world's history, a new fountain of happiness and blessings which were unknown before. I. The words, " God was manifest in the Flesh," are trans- lated from a sentence in which the reading is doubtful and the variation remarkable. In the original Greek manuscripts, the presence or absence of a bar across the centre of a single letter here makes all the j difference between our reading the substantive " God," or the rela- tive pronoun " Who." It is clearly impossible, here and now, to enter upon a discussion of the critical question, whether this bar ought or ought not to be retained. It may suffice to express the opinion that there is no sufficient reason for changing the original text, so as to alter the rendering of our English Bible. a An alteration would naturally be welcome to those persons who desire to make the Bible speak the language of Socinianism, and who see in this text a serious difficulty. And yet even if the reading " God " should be given up, and the readiDg " Who " substituted for it, the change in the real drift of the passage would not be so great as is sometimes sup- posed. It is tolerably clear that with this word, whether it be " God " or " Who," the Apostle begins a quotation, probably taken from some Christian Hymn. b Now, if the quotation begins with the word " God," it is sufficiently a Long after this sermon was preached, the authors of the Revised Version adopted the change in question, but for reasons which do not appear to be conclusive, and, as it would seem, under a certain bias, which is more distinctly illustrated by their marginal annotations at Rom. is. 5. b Cf. Mack, Comm. iiber die Pastoral briefe, p. 297. God in Httman Form. 109 complete in itself ; if with the word " Who," or even " He Who," it is evidently an incomplete fragment, which refers to some person named in the preceding line of the Hymn. But to Whom does this "Who" refer? Now, here the word " manifested" will assist us. a If the Person spoken of in the text had had no existence before His Birth, it would not have been natural to speak of Him at His Birth as being " manifested in the Flesh." When an infant is born in any of our families, we do not say that it was "manifested in the flesh." Why not? Because, although that infant now has an immortal soul distinct from its body, although linked with it, and in a certain true sense manifested through it, that soul had no exist- ence independent of and before the body of the infant. We do not speak of a thing being " manifested " at the moment of its first beginning to exist. The idea of mani- festation is not opposed to non-existence, but to hidden existence ; indeed, manifestation takes for granted a pre- vious unmanifested existence. And, therefore, the phrase, " manifest in the flesh," would be inappropriate and absurd as applied to an ordinary infant at its birth. You might just as well speak of a house being " manifested " in stone or brick when it is built, or of a railway embankment being " manifested " when it is thrown up. Manifestation 1 implies the previous existence of the thing or person manifested; it marks a point in the history of the thing or person, at which it passes out of hidden, into public and visible, life. If, then, the text speaks of a manifestation in the flesh, whether it describes the Person so manifested as " God " or not, it must at the least mean that Ho existed before this manifestation took place, or, in other words, before His Birth. *■ Observe the use of