by a Jewish mob to put Christ to death, just as, if Peter, John and the others had been in the majority, he would have set Him free. The people whose motto is, a good time to-day-tomorrow take care of itself, may skip along smoothly enough over the levels of fortune, but they break down before life's rough places. God and men love a soul which has convictions, strong persuasions, beliefs which cannot easily be shaken. Contend for We take our lives too easily. justice even if it costs you something. Hazard your comfort, your good name, your money to see that right is done. There is something tonic and stimulating in the example of men who feel they are called to track antarctic ice-fields in order to solve the secret of the poles, and who true to that conviction go forward to starvation and freezing. Lack of principle is sinful and leads to catastrophies just as terrible as do the wicked passions. VII "OUR CITIZENSHIP IN HEAVEN" (Preached in the Church of the Redeemer, Brooklyn.) "For our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself."-Phil. III:20, 21. The passage reminds one of those mountains that primeval convulsions lifted up on successive terraces. The climber to-day looks above and thinks he sees the top, but when you gain the ridge, lo! another summit looms beyond to show in turn another higher yet. St. Paul shows thought rising above thought, conception overtopping conception. Let us dwell on the comprehensive sweep of these words, as they sound the depths of humanity and soar to the contemplation of divine omnipotence. 1. We start low down with Man's Body of Humiliation. The expression in the old Bibles -"our vile body”—is not to be retained. We dare not apply such a term to the nature our blessed Lord assumed at the Incarnation. It is rather a body in which we meet humiliation. It holds us down by physical bands, limiting mental application and hindering the spirit. Looked at in the most favorable light, it is an animal nature which, except under the tense guidance of a very strong soul, is likely to break out into passionate insurrection. In its innumerable nerve centres it holds the elements of pain, the seats of disease, the causes of functional disorder, and of organic decay. It connects man with the very soil out of which he was formed, by the productions of which he subsists, along which he passes in the morning to his work and in the evening to his rest; to which he is chained-into which he falls at death. Mortality is much the same word with mortification. 2. We get on a higher plane in the thought of our citizenship. In spite of disease and death, we belong to a commonwealth whose chief and most populous province is not here. Our citizenship, our commonwealth is in heaven. The term "conversation" carries the early |