heaven. Give us demonstration, chains of evidence-chapter and verse-authority.

But simple men had decided the matter already. They knew very little of antiquity, church authority, and shadows of coming events which prophecy casts before: but their eyes saw the light, and their hearts felt the present God. Wise Pharisees and learned doctors said, to account for a wondrous miracle, “ Give God the glory." But the poor unlettered man, whose blinded eye had for the first time looked on a face of love, replied, "Whether this man be a sinner or not, I know not: one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see."

The well-read Jews could not settle the literary question, whether the marks of his appearance coincided with the prophecies. But the Samaritans felt the life of God: "Now we believe, not because of thy word, but because we have. heard Him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ."

The Shepherd had come, and the sheep knew his voice. Brethren, in all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before the intellect: the things of God are spiritually discerned. You know truth by being true: you recognize God by being like Him. The Scribe comes and says, I will prove to you that this is sound doctrine by chapter and verse, by what the old and best writers say, by evidence such as convinces the intellect of an intelligent lawyer or juryman. Think you the conviction of faith is got in that way?

Christ did not teach like the Scribes. He spoke His truth. He said, "If any man believe not, I judge him not; the word which I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day." It was true, and the guilt of disbelieving it was not an error of the intellect but a sin of the heart. Let us stand upright: let us be sure that the test of truth is the soul within us. Not at second-hand can we have assurance of what is divine and what is not: only at first-hand. The sheep of Christ hear His voice.

The third proof given by Christ was pastoral fidelity: "I lay down my life for the sheep." Now here is the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice: the sacrifice of one instead of another: life saved by the sacrifice of another life.

Most of us know the meagre explanation of these words which satisfies the Unitarians: they say that Christ merely died as a martyr, in attestation of the truths He taught.

But you will observe the strength of the expression which we can not explain away, "I lay down my life for," i. e, instead of "the sheep." If the Shepherd had not sacrificed Himself, the sheep must have been the sacrifice.

Observe, however, the suffering of Christ was not the same suffering as that from which He saved us. The suffering of Christ was death. But the suffering from which He redeemed us by death was more terrible than death. The pit into which He descended was the grave. But the pit in which we should have been lost forever, was the pit of selfishness and despair.

Therefore St. Paul affirms, "If Christ be not risen, ye are yet in your sins." If Christ's resurrection be a dream, and He be not risen from the grave of death, you are yet in the grave of guilt. He bore suffering to free us from what is worse than suffering-sin: temporal death to save us from death everlasting: His life given as an offering for sin to save the soul's eternal life.

Now in the text this sacrificing love of Christ is paralleled by the love of the Father to the Son. As He loved the sheep, so the Father had loved Him. Therefore the sacrifice of Christ is but a mirror of the love of God. The love of the Father to the Son is self-sacrificing love.

You know that shallow men make themselves merry with this doctrine. The sacrifice of God, they say, is a figment and an impossibility. Nevertheless this parallel tells us that it is one of the deepest truths of all the universe. It is the profound truth which the ancient fathers endeavored to express in the doctrine of the Trinity. For what is the love of the Father to the Son-Himself yet not Himself—but the grand truth of Eternal Love losing Itself and finding Itself again in the being of another? What is it but the sublime expression of the unselfishness of God ?

It is a profound, glorious truth; I wish I knew how to put it in intelligible words. But if these words of Christ do not make it intelligible to the heart, how can any words of mine? The life of blessedness-the life of love-the life of sacrifice -the life of God, are identical. All love is sacrifice-the giving of life and self for others. God's life is sacrifice-for the Father loves the Son as the Son loves the sheep for whom He gave His life.

Whoever will humbly ponder upon this will, I think, understand the Atonement better than all theology can teach him. Oh, my brethren, leave men to quarrel as they will about the theology of the Atonement; here in these words is the religion of it-the blessed, all-satisfying religion for our hearts. The self-sacrifice of Christ was the satisfaction to the Father.

How could the Father be satisfied with the death of Christ, unless He saw in the sacrifice mirrored His own love?-for

God can be satisfied only with that which is perfect as Himself. Agony does not satisfy God-agony only satisfied Moloch. Nothing satisfies God but the voluntary sacrifice of love.

The pain of Christ gave God no pleasure-only the love that was tested by pain-the love of perfect obedience. He was obedient unto death.

XX.

THE DOUBT OF THOMAS.

"Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."John xx. 29.

THE day on which these words were spoken was the first day of the week. On that day Thomas received demonstration that his Lord was risen from the dead. On that same day a week before, Thomas had declared that no testimony of others, no eyesight of his own, nothing short of touching with his hands the crucifixion marks in his Master's body, should induce him to believe a fact so unnatural as the resurrection of a human being from the grave. Those seven days between must therefore have been spent in a state of miserable uncertainty. How miserable and how restless none can understand but those who have felt the wretchedness of earnest doubt.

Doubt moreover, observe, respecting all that is dear to a Christian's hopes. For if Christ were not risen, Christianity was false, and every high aspiration which it promised to gratify was thrown back on the disappointed heart.

Let us try to understand the doubt of Thomas. There are some men whose affections are stronger than their understandings: they feel more than they think. They are simple, trustful, able to repose implicitly on what is told them-liable sometimes to verge upon credulity and superstition, but take them all in all, perhaps the happiest class of minds: for it is happy to be without misgivings about the love of God and our own eternal rest in Him. Blessed," said Christ to Thomas, "are they that have believed."

There is another class of men whose reflective powers are stronger than their susceptive: they think out truth-they do not feel it out. Often highly gifted and powerful minds,

they can not rest till they have made all their grounds certain: they do not feel safe as long as there is one possibility of delusion left: they prove all things. Such a man was

Thomas. He has well been called the rationalist among the apostles. Happy such men can not be. An anxious and inquiring mind dooms its possessor to unrest. But men of generous spirit, manly and affectionate, they may be: Thomas was. When Christ was bent on going to Jerusalem, to certain death, Thomas said, "Let us go up too, that we may die with him." And men of mighty faith they may become, if they are true to themselves and their convictions: Thomas did. When such men do believe, it is belief with all the heart and soul for life. When a subject has been once thoroughly and suspiciously investigated, and settled once for all, the adherence of the whole reasoning man, if given in at all, is given frankly and heartily as Thomas gave it-"My Lord, and my God."

Now this question of a resurrection which made Thomas restless, is the most anxious that can agitate the mind of man. So awful in its importance, and out of Christ so almost desperately dark in its uncertainty, who shall blame an earnest man severely if he crave the most indisputable proofs?

Very clearly Christ did not. Thomas asked of Christ a sign: he must put his own bands into the prints. His Master gave him that sign or proof. He said, "Reach hither thy hand." He gave it, it is true, with a gentle and delicate reproof-but He did give it. Now from that condescension we are reminded of the darkness that hangs round the question of a resurrection, and how excusable it is for a man to question earnestly until he has got proof to stand on. For if it were not excusable to crave a proof, our Master never would have granted one. Resurrection is not one of those questions on which you can afford to wait: it is the question of life and death. There are times when it does not weigh heavily. When we have some keen pursuit before us: when we are young enough to be satisfied to enjoy ourselves-the problem does not press itself. We are too laden with the pressure of the present to care to ask what is coming. But at last a time comes when we feel it will be all over soonthat much of our time is gone, and the rest swiftly going. And let a man be as frivolous as he will at heart, it is a question too solemn to be put aside-Whether he is going down into extinction and the blank of everlasting silence or not. Whether in those far ages, when the very oak which is to form his coffin shall have become fibres of black mould, and the church-yard in which he is to lie shall have become per

haps unconsecrated ground, and the spades of a generation yet unborn shall have exposed his bones, those bones will be the last relic in the world to bear record that he once trod this green earth, and that life was once dear to him, Thomas, or James, or Paul. Or whether that thrilling, loving, thinking something, that he calls himself, has indeed within it an indestructible existence which shall still be conscious, when every thing else shall have rushed into endless wreck. Oh, in the awful earnestness of a question such as that, a speculation and a peradventure will not do: we must have proof. The honest doubt of Thomas craves a sign as much as the cold doubt of the Sadducee. And a sign shall be mercifully given to the doubt of love which is refused to the doubt of indifference.

This passage presents two lines of thought.

I. The naturalness of the doubts of Thomas, which partly excuses them.

II. The evidences of the Christian Resurrection.

I. The naturalness of the doubts of Thomas.

The first assertion that we make to explain those doubts is, that Nature is silent respecting a future life. All that reason, all that nature, all that religion, apart from Christ, have to show us is something worse than darkness. It is the twilight of excruciating uncertainty. There is enough in the riddle of this world to show us that there may be a life to come; there is nothing to make it certain that there will be one. We crave, as Thomas did, a sign either in the height above or in the depth beneath, and the answer seems to fall back like ice upon our hearts-" there shall no sign be given you."

It is the uncertainty of twilight. You strain at something in the twilight, and just when you are beginning to make out its form and color, the light fails you, and your eyelids sink down, wet and wearied with the exertion. Just so it is when we strain into nature's mysteries, to discern the secrets of the great hereafter. Exactly at the moment when we think we begin to distinguish something, the light goes out and we are left groping in darkness-the darkness of the grave.

Let us forget for a moment that we ever heard of Christ: what is there in life or nature to strengthen the guess that there is a life to come? There are hints-there are probabilities-there is nothing more. Let us examine some of those probabilities.

First, there is an irrepressible longing in our hearts. We