and thus in a spiritual sense may we too "draw light from the fountain of the setting sun."

Almighty God, who, when by following the lusts of our nature we were all against Thee, didst send Thine Onlybegotten Son to bring us back to Thee, and who in Thine infinite bounty hast provided us with such a rich treasure of beauty and truth, for the nurture and training up of our hearts and minds,-who hast spread out Thy glory over our heads in the heavens, and Thy wonderworking love in the firmament of the Gospel,-yea, who hast manifested Thine own Self to us in the person of Thy Son,-grant that our hearts and all that is within us may ever glorify Thee for this Thine unimaginable lovingkindness. Teach us to feel the vanity and worthlessness of everything that would draw us away from Thee, the sin that taints it, the death that cleaves to it; and lift up our hearts, we humbly beseech Thee, enable us to lift them up, so that the King of Glory may come in, and that we may ever abide with Him, who became Man for us, and died for us, and now liveth and reigneth ever, with Thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.

SERMON XIII.

THE SWORD OF THE GOSPEL.

MATTHEW X. 34.

Think not that I came to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

THESE are strange and awful words, my brethren; and we can hardly help starting inwardly when they first strike upon our ears. For think, by whom they were spoken. By the Lamb of God; by the Prince of Peace; by Him, at whose coming into the world the angels proclaimed Peace on earth; by Him, whose Gospel, if men followed its biddings, would turn the whole earth into a Paradise of Peace and Love; by Him, whose disciples are bound, not only to eschew and cast away all enmity and hatred and illwill and violence and strife, but even to love their enemies, to do good to them, and to soften and melt their hearts by heaping kindnesses, as St Paul exhorts us, like coals of fire upon them. Yes! these words, which sound so fierce, were spoken by our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. He, whose heart was the living temple of Peace, and whose voice was the breath of Love, when He sent out His twelve Apostles to preach the Kingdom of Heaven to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, tells them, in the speech by which He prepares them for this their mission, that they must not be deceived by the notion that He had come to send peace upon earth; for that He had not come to send peace, but a sword.

Now how are we to explain the seeming contradiction between these words, which look so like the words of a Destroyer, and all the rest of our Lord's life, which in the least things, as well as the greatest, was in the highest perfection the life of a Saviour. That it is to be explained, and most satisfactorily, we may be certain. For, though in all the other sons of men we are perpetually meeting with perplexing inconsistencies and contradictions, it is otherwise in Christ Jesus. A man's actions and words will very often sort ill together. He will look as though he were patcht up of pieces awkwardly fitted to each other, huddled together from every quarter of the globe. One might fancy the four winds were holding their court in his breast. He will blow hot and cold with a breath. He is all at sixes and sevens. But in Christ Jesus, as He was to be both the Atonement for the world, and the Atoner and Restorer of harmony within it, everything is at one: everything in Him is in perfect harmony. There are no windings or doublings in His path, no swervings to the right or to the left it is straight and clear as the path of the sun through the heavens.

This is one among the many marks betokening a total difference of nature between Jesus of Nazareth and all the other sons of men. For suppose you were to be told of any man, whom you knew to profess the utmost meekness and gentleness as the rule of his life, that on some occasion he had spoken with bitterness and fierceness, what would you say? You would not tax him, I trust, as many would be prone to do, with hypocrisy. You would not cry out that his meekness and gentleness were all a pretense, and that his real nature, which he had unguardedly suffered to peep out, was just as full of bad feelings as that of other

men.

This would be very uncharitable.

The failings

of the good do not prove them to be hypocrites. They merely prove that they are men, and that, as such, their better purposes are almost as apt to be nipt and blighted by sudden gusts of passion, as the blossoms of a fruit-tree in spring, when the East wind is scouring over the earth. So that the feelings which such a sight ought to awaken in us, are, compassion for him who has so fallen, shame and contrition for the frailty of our common nature, and a resolution to redouble our watchfulness over ourselves, lest we too be in like manner overtaken. That however which bears on our present subject, is, that in a man nobody would be much surprised at hearing of any inconsistency. But when we meet with anything that looks like an inconsistency in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we feel sure that this appearance must arise from some mistake or other. For, as one of the Fathers tells us, "while even in the worst men there is always something good, and even in the best men always something bad, God alone is perfect and without sin; and one Man alone is perfect and without sin, Jesus Christ: because Christ is God." Moreover, as He was without sin, so must He have been without contradiction and inconsistency. For, wherever there is contradiction, there must be sin, or at least frailty and infirmity. Sin walks in darkness, in a darkness of its own making, and therefore reels to and fro. Godliness walks in light, in a light which God pours upon it; and therefore it steps straightforward. Sin, like its child Death, tears us limb from limb, and crumbles us to atoms whereas Godliness is a higher life, the true life, the life of the spirit, and, spreading itself out through the whole man, makes all his members work together, to the

perfecting of that image of God, in which we were made, and to which we have been redeemed.

With the assurance therefore, that, whatever seeming contradictions may strike us in our Lord's words, there must be some way of looking at them, in which we shall perceive that they are all parts of the one great flower of Truth, as it were leaves of the rose of Sharon,bearing this assurance in mind, let us try whether we can explain the contradiction which we seem to have found between the words of the text, and the general spirit of our Saviour's life and doctrine. At the same time, in this, as in all like enquiries, we must remember that, if we do not succeed in discovering the harmony and unity we are seeking, the fault must lie with ourselves. The fogs and mists, which rise from our hearts, darken and cut short our sight. Straight and openly outspread as the path of the sun is, if the earth sends up her clouds overbead, we cannot trace the line of it, or make out how he, who but now was in the east, comes anon to be aglow in the west. Pure and lovely and lifegiving as its light is, if it shines through a mist, it may look firy and wrathful: if it shines through a darkened glass, it burns.

If the sun shines through a darkened glass it burns. In following out this image, I have lit on the very explanation we were searching after. Thus it often happens, as we see in the convincing force with which our Lord's parables come home to our understandings, that an image or illustration will lead us at once by a kind of short cut to the truth, at which we could not have arrived, without taking a long round, by the regular highroad of argument. We may now discern, why the love of Christ and the peace of the Gospel wear such a