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no other way than this. They may try by the principle of selfishness, the principle of moral rule, or the principle of civil authority. Let the political economist come forward with his principle of selfishness, and tell us that this is that by which alone the wealth of nations can accrue. He may get a nation in which there are a wealthy few and miserable many, but not a brotherhood of Christians. Suppose you say, men should love one another. Will that make them love one another? You may come forward with the crushing rule of political authority. Papal Rome has tried it and failed. She bound up the masses of the human race as a gigantic iceberg; but she could give only a temporary principle of unity and cohesion.

Therefore we turn back once more to the cross of Christ : through this alone we learn there is one God, one Father, one baptism, one Elder Brother in whom all can be brothers. But there is a something besides, a deeper principle still. We are told in this passage we can be reconciled to man by the body of Christ through death. And now, brethren, let us understand this. By the cross of Christ the apostle meant, reconciled by the spirit of the cross. And what was that spirit? It was the spirit of giving, and of suffering, and of loving, because He had suffered. Say what we will, love is not gratitude for favors which have been received. Why is the child more beloved by the parent than the parent by the child? Why did the Redeemer love His disciples more than they loved their Master? Benefits will not bind the affection; you must not expect that they will. You must suffer if you would love; you must remember that "it is more blessed to give than to receive." The Apostle Paul felt this when he said reconciliation was produced through the body of the flesh of Christ by death.

Once more: man becomes by the Redeemer's atonement reconciled to himself.

That self-reconciliation is necessary, because we do not readily forgive ourselves. God may have forgiven us, but we can not forgive ourselves. You may obtain a remission of the past, but you can not forgive yourself and get back the feeling of self-respect, unity within, rest, by sitting still and believing that God has forgiven you, and that you have nothing left to look for? My brethren, there is a spirit of self-torture within us which is but a perversion of nobleness, a mistake of the true principle. When you have done wrong, you want to suffer. Love demands a sacrifice, and only by sacrifice can it reconcile itself to self. Then it is that the sacrifice of Christ replies to this, answers it, satisfies

it, and makes it plain. The sacrifice of Christ was suffering in love, it was surrender to the will of God. The Apostle Paul felt this when that Spirit was with him he was reconciled to himself. He says, "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” If ever you devoted yourself to another's happiness or amelioration, so far and so long as you were doing that you forgave yourself; you felt the spirit of inward self-reconciliation; and what we want is only to make that perpetual, to make that binding which we do by fits and starts, to feel ourselves a living sacrifice, to know that we are, in our highest and best state, victims, offered up in love on the great altar of the kingdom of Christ, offered by Him to God as the first-fruits of His sacrifice; then we are reconciled to ourselves "by the blood of His flesh through death."

And lastly, through the atonement of the Redeemer, man becomes reconciled to duty. There is no discord more terrible than that between man and duty. There are few of us who fancy we have found our own places in this world; our lives, our partnerships, our professions, and our trades, are not those which we should have chosen for ourselves. There is an ambition within us which sometimes makes us fancy we are fit for higher things, that we are adapted for other and better things than those to which we are called. But we turn again to the cross of Christ, and the mystery of life be comes plain. The life and death of Christ are the reconciliation of man to the duties which he has to do. You can not study His marvellous life without perceiving that the whole of its details are uncongenial, mean, trivial, wretched circumstances-from which the spirit of a man revolts.

To bear the sneer of the Sadducee and the curse of the Pharisee; to be rejected by His family and friends; to be harassed by the petty disputes and miserable quarrels of His followers about their own personal precedence; to be treated by the government of His country as a charlatan and a demagogue; to be surrounded by a crowd of men, coming and going without sympathy; to retire and find His leisure intruded on and Himself pursued for ignoble ends-these were the circumstances of the Redeemer's existence here. Yet in these it was that the noblest life the world has ever seen was lived. He retired into the wilderness, and one by one put down all those visions that would have seduced Him from the higher path of duty; the vision of comfort which tempted Him to change the stones of this world into bread; the vision of ambition which tempted Him to make the kingdoms of this world His own by seeking good through evil;

the vision which tempted Him to distrust God, and become important by pursuing some strange, unauthorized way of His own, instead of following the way of submission to the will of God.

He ascended into the transfiguration mount, and there His Spirit converses with those of an elder dispensation, who had fought the fight before Him, Moses and Elias, and they spoke to Him of the triumph which He had to accomplish in death at Jerusalem. And He went down again with calm, serene, and transfigured faith, and there, at the very foot of the mount, He found His disciples engaged in some miserable squabble with the Scribes and the Pharisees about casting out a devil. And this life of His is the only interpretation of this life of ours-the reconciliation of our hearts with what we have to do. It is not by change of circumstances, but by fitting our spirits to the circumstances in which God has placed us, that we can be reconciled to life and duty. If the duties before us be not noble, let us ennoble them by doing them in a noble spirit; we become reconciled to life if we live in the Spirit of Him who reconciled the life of God with the lowly duties of servants.

And now one word in conclusion. The central doctrine of Christianity is the atonement. Take that away and you obliterate Christianity. If Christianity were merely the imita tion of Christ, why then the imitation of any other good man, the Apostle Paul or John, might have become a kind of Christianity. If Christianity were merely martyrdom for truth, then, with the exception of a certain amount of degree, I see no difference between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus Christ. But Christianity is more than this. It is the At-one-ment of the Soul. It is a reconciliation which the life and death of Christ have wrought out for this world —the reconciliation of man to God, the reconciliation of man to man, the reconciliation of man to self, and the reconciliation of man to duty.

XXI.

THE PRE-EMINENCE OF CHARITY.

"And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins."-1 Peter iv. 8.

THE grace of charity is exalted as the highest attainment of the Christian life by St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John. These three men were very different from each other. Each was the type of a distinct order of character. And it is a proof that the Gospel is from God, and that the sacred writ-" ings are inspired from a single Divine source, that personal peculiarities are not placed foremost in them, but the foremost place is given by each to a grace which certainly was not the characteristic quality of all the three.

It is said in these modern days that Christianity was a system elaborated by human intellect. Men, they say, philosophized and thought it out. Christianity, it is maintained, like ethics, is the product of human reason. Now had this been true, we should have found the great teachers of Christianity each exalting that particular quality which was most remarkable in his own temperament. Just as the English honor truthfulness, and the French brilliancy, and the Hindoos subtlety, and the Italians finesse-and naturally, because these are predominant in themselves-we should have found the apostles insisting most strongly on those graces which grew most naturally in the soil of their own hearts.

Indeed, in a degree it is so. St. John's character was tender, emotional and contemplative. Accordingly, his writings exhibit the feeling of religion and the predominance of the inner life over the outer.

St. Paul was a man of keen intellect, and of soaring and aspiring thought which would endure no shackles on its freedom. And his writings are full of the two subjects we might have expected from this temperament. He speaks a great deal of intellectual gifts; very much of Christian liberty.

St. Peter was remarkable for personal courage. A soldier by nature frank, free, generous, irascible. In his writings, accordingly, we find a great deal said about martyrdom.

But each of these men, so different from each other, exalts love above his own peculiar quality. It is very remarkable. Not merely does each call charity the highest, but each names

it in immediate connection with his own characteristic virtue, and declares it to be more Divine.

St. John, of course, calls love the heavenliest. That we expect from St. John's character. "God is love. He that

dwelleth in love dwelleth in God;" "No man hath seen God at any time: if we love one another God dwelleth in us.” But St. Paul expressly names it in contrast with the two feelings for which he was personally most remarkable, and, noble as they are, prefers it before them. First, in contrast with intellectual gifts. Thus, "Covet earnestly the best gifts: and yet show I unto you a more excellent way: though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels, and have not charity, it is nothing." Gifts are nothing in comparison of charity. Again, "We know that we all have knowledge: knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up." Knowledge is nothing in comparison.

Next, in comparison of that liberty which was so dear to him. Christian liberty permitted the converts the use of meats, and the disregard of days from which the strict law of Judaism had debarred them. Well, but there were cases · in which the exercise of that liberty might hurt the scruples of some weak Christian brother, or lead him to imitate the example against his conscience. "If thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably." Liberty said, You have a right to indulge; but Charity said, Refrain. So that, according to St. Paul, there is one thing, and one only, to which Christian liberty must be sacrificed. That one is Christian love.

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Now let us see how St. Peter does honor to the same grace, at the expense of that which we should have expected him to reckon the essential grace of manhood. Just before the text, we find the command, "Be sober, and watch unto prayer. This is a sentence out of St. Peter's very heart. For in it we have prayer represented as the night-watch of a warrior, armed, who must not sleep his watch away. sober, and watch"-the language of the soldier and the sentinel; words which remind you of him who drew his sword to defend his Master, and who in penitence remembered his own disastrous sleep when he was surprised as a sentry at his post. But immediately after this "And, above all things, have fervent charity amongst yourselves." Sobriety, selfrule, manhood, courage, yes; but the life of them all, says St. Peter, the very crown of manhood, without which sobriety is but prudent selfishness, and courage is but brute instinct is love.

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Now I take that unanimity as a proof that the Gospel comes

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