take the form of impetuosity or rashness—the form of meanness never. Young Men! if you have been deterred from religion by its apparent feebleness and narrowness, remember-It is a manly thing to be a Christian.

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XIX.

THE KINGDOM OF THE TRUTH.

ASSIZE SERMON.

JOHN Xviii. 37. "Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then! Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. . To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice."

THE Church is the kingdom of God on earth, and the whole fabric of the Christian Religion rests on the monarchy of Christ. The Hebrew prisoner who stood before the Roman Judge claimed to be the King of men, and eighteen centuries have only verified His claim. There is not a man bearing the Christian name who does not, in one form or another, acknowl edge Him to be the Sovereign of his soul.

The question therefore at once suggests itself— On what title does this claim rest?

Besides the title on which the Messiah grounded His pretensions to be the Ruler of a kingdom, three are conceivable. The title of force; the title of prescriptive authority; or the title of incontrovertible reasoning.

Had the Messiah founded His kingdom upon the basis of Force, He would have simply been a rival

:

of the Caesars. The imperial power of Rome rested on that Principle. This was all that Pilate meant at first by the question, "Art thou a king?" As a Roman he had no other conception of rule. Right well had Rome fulfilled her mission as the iron kingdom, which was to command by strength, and give to the world the principles of Law. But that kingdom was wasting when these words were spoken. For seven hundred years had the Empire been building itself up. It gave way, at last, and was crumbled into fragments by its own ponderous massiveness. To use the language of the prophet Daniel, miry clay had mixed with the kingdom of iron, and the softer nations which had been absorbed into it broke down its once invin cible strength, by corrupting and enervating its citizens: the conquerors of the world dropped the sword from a grasp grown nerveless. The Empire of strength was passing away; for no kingdom founded on force. is destined to permanence. "They that take the

sword shall perish with the sword."

Before Pontius Pilate, Christ distinctly disclaimed this Right of Force, as the foundation of His sover eignty." If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight: but now is my kingdom not from hence" (v. 36)..

The next conceivable basis of a universal kingdom is prescriptive authority. The scribes and priests who waited outside for their victim conceived of such a kingdom. They had indeed already an ecclesiastical kingdom which dated back far beyond the origin of Rome. They claimed to rule on a title such as this →→ "It is written." But neither on this title did the. Sa viour found his claim. He spoke lightly of institu

tions which were venerable from age. He contravened opinions which were gray with the hoar of ages. It may be that at times He defended Himself on the au thority of Moses, by showing that what He taught was not in opposition to Moses; but it is observable that He never rested His claims as a Teacher, or as the Messiah, on that foundation. The scribes fell back on this-"It has been said:" or, "It is written." Christ taught, as the men of His day remarked, on an authority very different from that of the scribes. Not even on His own authority. He did not claim that His words: should be recognized because He said them; but because they were true. "If I say the truth, why do ye not believe Me?" Prescription-personal authority -these were not His basis of a kingdom.

One more possible title remains. He might have claimed to rule over men on the ground of incontrovertible demonstration of His principles. This was the ground taken by every philosopher who was the founder of a sect. Apparently, after the failure of his first guess, Pilate thought in the second surmise that this was what Jesus meant by calling Himself a king. When he heard of a kingdom, he thought he had before him a rival of Cæsar; but when truth was named, he seems to have fancied that he was called to try a rival of the philosophers: some new candidate for a system; some new pretender of a truth which was to dethrone. its rival systems.

This seems to be implied in the bitter question, What is Truth?" For the history of opinion. in those days was like the history of opinion in our own, religions against religions, philosophies against philosophies; religion and philosophy opposed to one another;

the opinion of to-day dethroned by the opinion of tomorrow; the heterodoxy of this age reckoned the or thodoxy of the succeeding one. And Pilate, feeling the vainness and the presumption of these pretensions, having lived to see failure after failure of systems which pretended to teach That which is, smiled bitterly at the enthusiast who again asserted confidently his claims to have discovered the indiscoverable. There broke from his lips a bitter, half-sarcastic, half-sad exclamation of hopeless scepticism-"What is Truth?"

And, indeed, had the Redeemer claimed this, to overthrow the doctrine of the Porch and of the Academy, and to enthrone Christianity as a Philosophy of Life upon their ruins by argument, that sceptical cry would have been not ill-timed.

In these three ways have men attempted the Propagation of the Gospel. By force, when the Church ruled by persecution; by prescriptive authority, when she claimed infallibility, or any modification of infallibility, in the Popery of Rome, or the Popery of the pulpit; by Reasoning, in the age of "evidences," when she only asked to have her proofs brought forward and calmly heard, pledged herself to rule the world by the conviction of the understanding, and laid the founda tions of rationalism deep and broad. Let us hear the claim of the King Himself. He rested His royal rights on His testimony to the Truth."Thou sayest, for I am a king (correcter translation); to this end was I born, to bear witness to the truth." The mode in which the subjects of the kingdom were brought be neath his sway was by assimilation. "Every one that is of the Truth heareth my voice." These, then, are our points :