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WEAKNESS.

ST. LUKE, Xxxiii. 1—4.

And the whole multitude of them arose, and led Him unto Pilate.

And they began to accuse Him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar, saying that He Himself is Christ, a king. And Pilate asked Him, saying, Art Thou the King of the Jews? And he answered him and said, Thou sayest it. Then said Pilate to the chief priests and to the people, I find no fault in this man."

LOOKING at our Lord's trial again by the light of our own feelings it must strike us how intensely galling, we may perhaps even venture to say irritating, was the way in which it was conducted;not merely unjustly, but inconsistently; one accusation being brought forward, and then another, so that there could be no power of defence;—and this inconsistency aggravated by the weakness which was one of the especial characteristics of the judge who presided at it. The sight of weakness must have been as trying to Christ as it is to us; for mankind are powerless against it, more powerless far than against strength, under whatever form it may exhibit itself. In strength there is an element of goodness which may be touched; in weakness there is none; and when it is allied with evil there is

And thus we may sup

nothing to stop its course. pose that our Blessed Saviour's cup of suffering would have been less bitter if His life had been assailed by the open fury of His avowed enemies, than it was when His death was meted out to Him, as it were by degrees, by the cold, vacillating, contemptible weakness of the Roman governor. Certainly, if contempt could have been excited in the Bosom of Him who knew and was about to pay the penalty of sin, it must have arisen in the mind of Christ, when He saw the miserable Pilate thus playing with justice; exciting what would have been false hopes in one who was not foreknowing, and then casting them aside, and yielding to the outery of the mob, with the wretched self-deception that it was not his own act and deed.

And we ourselves, how do we feel towards Pilate? We do more than despise him. We shrink probably from his name; we shudder at the thought of his guilt. Does it never strike us how many, many times we have committed the same sin in a lighter form? Or perhaps not really lighter. For Pilate was a heathen, he knew nothing of the prophecies concerning our Lord, nothing of His history; he had scarely heard, so it appears, of His miracles. The Saviour of the world stood before him like any other prisoner; there was therefore no wild rejection of Divine authority; and the accusation brought forward was only political; he had but to exercise the ordinary rules of justice, and he did exercise them; he examined, he arrived

at a right conclusion, and he owned his conclusion, only he was too weak to act either for or against it, and therefore he threw the decision upon circumstances. There is nothing strange in all this, nothing which we have not probably all experienced again and again. It required no demoniacal spirit of iniquity to follow such a course, for it is human, essentially human. Let us only search into our own hearts and we shall see that it is so.

Pilate was a conscientious man, conscientious, that is up to a certain point. If he had not been he would have delivered up our Lord at the first, in obedience to the clamour of His enemies. And we too are conscientious; at least there is scarcely one amongst us who will confess that he is not. Temptation comes before us, it may be, in some specious form. Kindheartedness or sympathy, or an avoidance of singularity, call upon us to adopt a certain line of conduct. We are not certain that we shall be right in so doing. Conscience indeed whispers that in all probability we shall be wrong, and we dare not act against conscience,—we should know no peace hereafter if we were to do sɔ. We sit down therefore to examine into the question, and we endeavour to do so dispassionately. Perhaps we even pray to be guided to a right determination,nothing can in appearance be more upright and sincere than our intentions and our conduct. Conscience is silenced; but-we scarcely perceive it, yet we might do so if we examined our hearts closely,— it is only stilled, rendered dumb as it were; it does

not speak loudly in approval-and why is this? In the fulness of our self-satisfaction we have overlooked our will, we have not inquired whether we are bent upon following the higher or the lower will. Having mistaken wishing for willing,-and there is a vast distinction between the two,—we have not asked whether, if reason and conscience decide against inclination, we are resolved, whatever may be the sacrifice, to act upon that decision. The two wills, therefore, are left vacillating, and so the inquiry begins. At its close we see clearly that we have but one course to adopt,-the object of our desire must be relinquished. And we say to our conscience that it shall be so. Only,-our weak will, our higher will, it does not give us strength to flee, it can but wish, and we do not strive to increase its power by prayer. So we stand and gaze; we think and argue; always, perhaps, arriving at the same conclusion, and thus stilling any remonstrances of conscience, but taking no active steps to remove from the temptation, the strength of which, unknown to ourselves, increases whilst we linger. At length our higher will yields, possibly so little that we do not perceive that it is yielding, but, profiting by that momentary weakness, self-deception steps in to strengthen the lower will and bid us rush forward boldly into sin. We say that we must yield, because we have unfortunately in some way committed ourselves, and cannot draw back. We have only a choice of evils, we must submit to the opinion of others, or, in fact

-it is the common every day excuse, we cannot help ourselves.

And we cannot-it is then too late; but there is no excuse in the force of circumstances, no justification to be found in the apparent necessity. If we had been firmly bent upon obeying the higher will before the question was considered, there would have been no dallying with temptation when it was decided. If Pilate had been upright in will before he commenced our Lord's examination, he would not have been weakly cruel when it was ended. The result of such a sin is not always very evident, and therefore it may be the more dangerous. For there is no necessary falling away into greater sin because of this one wrong step. On the contrary, the very uneasiness we feel may make us more careful to act rightly in our wrong path. But we cannot make it otherwise than wrong. We may justify it to ourselves, we may deaden memory and silence conscience, and call upon the world to approve our nobleness, and self-denial, and honourable principle. But "that which is crooked cannot be made straight." We may pass through life, and lie down in death, without once daring to face the fact that we have been self-deceivers; but the unrepented sin which is buried with us in our graves has in it the germ of indestructibility, even like that which shall hereafter cause our bodies to spring forth, and at the Last Great Day it will assuredly rise again and confront us, to our shame, at the Bar of the All-seeing God.

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