set our hearts on the things that are winsome and quietly gracious, that we are lifted right out of the atmosphere where the little irritations are our masters, What our translation calls lovely means, rather, lovable. The power of Jesus was his lovableness. All but the mean love a real man. Somehow, the world cannot help feeling the power of gracious, winsome, largeness of heart. It is the greatest thing in the world and the most mighty. In one of our recent lessons we read that the faith that is said to remove mountains is as nothing beside it. Paul tells us that part of his secret is to get to love the lovable, to set our heart on it. In proportion as we really do so, it inevitably becomes ours. We only fail when we have really set our hearts on something less.

In the margin we read another rendering for "of good report." And yet, when we get right down to it, the old words suggest a very real meaning. Not what people speak well of, but what rings true. The goodness and kindness which have the genuine ring about them, which no one can ever hope to counterfeit. It is perfectly easy and natural, when it is the spontaneous outcome of a nature that has for long set its heart on these things. It is the atmosphere of a man who has outgrown his childhood, and come to the true temper of self-mastery through delight in the highest.

V. Is this Practical?

Paul certainly found it so. Not only he, moreover.

What we know as real culture is its result. What a difference there is between the bearing of a really large nature and the amusing bigness of the little man! The difference lies in the lesson. The secret is the setting of the heart on things which are really fine.

Moreover, it is part of the inexorable order of the universe. You can no more let sunlight in on a sensitive plate without results, than you can let fine things appeal to your heart without growing better thereby. Set your hearts on things like these, and the slow result is certain as the spring.

FOR

THE GREAT HIGH PRIEST.

`OR we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help us in time of need. For our high priest is one who can bear gently with the ignorant and erring, for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity. Who in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and having been heard for his godly fear, though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became unto all them that obey him the author of eternal salvation.

HEBREWS, chapters four and five.

THE GREAT HIGH PRIEST.

I. The Letter to the Hebrews.

As we have seen in the introductory lesson to these passages from the New Testament, this letter is not by Paul. It is so thoroughly Jewish in tone that for a while there was considerable doubt as to its obtaining a place with the other writings of the New Testament. It is, however, of quite early date, probably earlier by at least a decade than the earliest of our Gospels.

We see this in one or two points in the letter itself. In ix. 8 we read of the first tabernacle as still standing, which could hardly have been written after 70 A.D., when the temple was destroyed under Titus. The expectation of the speedy return of the Lord is akin to that which we have seen in Paul's letter to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. iv. 13-17). We see this, for

instance, in Hebrews (x. 25, 37).

We do not know who wrote the letter. Its title implies that it was directed specially to Jew Christians. We understand it aright only as we keep this in mind.

II. Its Jewish Point of View.

We see this in several ways.

The reference to the earlier dispensation or covenant, which looked to Moses as its author, as well as the constant citations of Jewish history, would be of comparatively little meaning to foreign readers. Its contrast of the more spiritual religion for which Jeremiah hoped (viii. 8-12), to this earlier covenant would have little meaning to them. It is, however, of special interest to those of us who have already studied the great Jerusalem preacher's picture of the religion of the heart.

We see this Jewish tone, too, on the idea of sacrifice, especially in the famous text "without shedding of blood there is no remission" (ix. 22). The statement is untrue in itself, and wholly so when it is applied to the death of Jesus. It had its meaning only for Jews. For them the statement is fundamental to the entire religion of the second temple.

Our lesson, too, in its picture of the high priest and the usages of the great day of atonement, is only vivid to those to

whom these things formed the familiar and most imposing part of the annual temple ceremonial.

III. The Underlying Attitude towards Jesus.

What makes the lesson of value to us is that underneath all this Jewish symbolism there lies the sense that Jesus is indeed a power to help us, because he was a man like ourselves. The whole lesson reiterates the thought of ii. 18,—“in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted."

At the heart of early Christianity lay a personal loyalty. It was everything to the first disciples. Their thought of their Master was never clear. Even at the last they do not seem to have understood him. After he was gone, their anticipation of his speedy return to set up his kingdom on earth is as far from the truth as their ideas as to that kingdom while he was with them. But, in spite of it all, the power of the beauty of the Lord whom they loved, they knew not why, grew and spread. It was the living contagion of a noble human life, which no ignorance and no superstition could take away, that created Christian character.

Here, too, in an atmosphere thoroughly Jewish, and laden with ideas which we have long outgrown, we find the same thing. Jesus is one of ourselves. He too suffers and learns obedience; is touched with the feeling of our weakness; becomes perfect only through the lessons of experience. The writer loves to think of him as tried in all points like as we are, and yet unconquered. In all the dark hours of persecution, when it was hard to hold to hope in the very face of death itself, they turned for strength to him who "offered up prayers with strong crying and tears," and became perfect in the end.

Through the ignorance of the time this picture of Jesus as the strong, beautiful human ideal, practicable for us too because he was one with us in all his experience, shines like a constant inspiration. It is that which makes our lesson one of the "Great Passages." Jesus can show us the road to live, because he travelled it as we have to, under our conditions, and in all the weakness of our nature. It is the gospel of the human Christ finding voice even in the writing of the Jew Christian. IV. The Theological Development.

In the dogmas of modern orthodoxy we have the natural result of the belief in the Bible as all of it of equal value.

Those who based the creeds on the Bible embodied in their system of belief from such writings as this Epistle elements which ought to have been long outgrown. The idea that the death of Jesus and the acceptance of its efficacy were essential to salvation is the result of the logical development of the Jewish thought in writings like our letter. The curious thing sometimes is that, while they, for instance, give great prominence to the thought of Jesus as the sacrifice, the passages which set him forth as the high priest receive little attention.

The true method is that which we have tried to follow here. We must discard those elements which distort the writer's presentation of the facts, and get behind them to the facts of experience themselves. In so doing, we at once get clear of the theological deductions from the writers' statements by discovering their origin.

V. The Simpler Gospel.

In so far as we do this, we come back to the simple inspiration in which Christianity found its first mighty impulse. We cease to be interested in the interpretation which those facts received when seen through the current religious beliefs of the first century. We get at the heart of a passage like our lesson,

and forget its form.

That is largely what is going on in the revolution of Christian thought which is being forced on the churches in our own time. Men are asking more and more for that human ideal and human inspiration which made Christianity possible. They are having to set on one side the theological presentation of it in the alien speech of earlier days.

The Jesus who helps men is the Jesus of whose human experience our lesson speaks. It is to the fact that his life is akin to ours that his power to uplift and inspire is due. He enters the world as does every human child. The battle of life we fight is the battle which he faced. He is a comrade on the very road we all travel. As we see in him our own true nature, there comes to us that blessed contagion of human goodness which is the hope of the world.