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was the highest form of religious life known in Israel, It was the life ascetic. It was the life of solitariness and penitential austerity. He drank no wine; he ate no pleasant food; he married no wife; he entered into no human relationship. It was the law of that stern and in its way sublime life, to cut out every human feeling as a weakness, and to mortify every natural instinct, in order to cultivate an intenser spirituality. A life in its own order grand, but indisputably unnatu ral...

Now, the first public act of our Redeemer's life is to go with with His disciples to a marriage. He conseerates marriage, and the sympathies which lead to ́marriage. He declares the sacredness of feelings which had been reckoned carnal, and low, and human. He stamps His image on human joys, human connections, human relationships. He pronounces that they are more than human, as it were, sacramental; the means whereby God's presence comes to us; the typės and shadows whereby higher and deeper relationships become possible to us. For it is through our human affections that the soul first learns to feel that its destiny is Divine. It is through a mortal yearning, unsatisfied, that the spirit ascends, seeking a higher object. It is through the gush of our human tendernesses that the Immortal and the Infinite in us reveals itself. Never does a man know the force that is in him till some mighty affection or grief has humanized the soul. It is by an earthly relationship that God has typified to us and helped us to conceive the only true Espousal the marriage of the soul to her Eternal Lord. It was the glory of Christianity to pronounce all these human feelings sacred; therefore it is that the

Church asserts their sacredness in a religious ceremony, for example, that of marriage. Do not mistake. It is not the ceremony that makes a thing religious; a ceremony can only declare a thing religious. The church cannot make sacred that which is not sacred. She is but here on earth as the moon, the witness of the light in heaven-by her ceremonies and by her institutions, to bear witness to eternal truths. She cannot by her manipulations manufacture a child of the devil, through baptism, into a child of God; she can only authoritatively declare the sublime truth, he is not the devil's child, but God's child, by right. She cannot make the bond of marriage sacred and indissoluble; she can only witness to the sacredness of that which the union of two spirits has already made; and such are her own words. Her minister is commanded by her to say, "Forasmuch as these two persons have consented together," there is the sacred Fact of Nature;-"I pronounce that they be man and wife," here is the authoritative witness to the fact.

Again, it was His glory to declare the sacredness of all natural enjoyments.

It was not a marriage only, but a marriage-feast, to which Christ conducted His disciples. Now, we cannot get over this plain fact, by saying that it was a religious ceremony; that would be mere sophistry. It was an indulgence in the festivity of life; as plainly as words can describe, here was a banquet of human enjoyment. The very language of the master of the feast about men who had well drunk tells us that there had been, not excess, of course, but happiness there, and merry-making.

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Neither can we explain away the lesson by saying

that it is no example to us; for Christ was there to do good, and that what was safe for Him might be unsafe for us. For if His life is no pattern for us here in this case of accepting an invitation, in what can we be sure it is a pattern? Besides, He took His disciples there, and His mother was there; they were not shielded, as He was, by immaculate purity. He was there as a guest at first, as Messiah only afterwards; thereby He declared the sacredness of natural enjoy.

ments.

!

Here again, then, Christ manifested His peculiar glory. The Temptation of the Wilderness was past the baptism of John, and the life of abstinence to which it introduced, were over; and now the Bridegroom comes before the world in the true glory of Messiah, not in the life of asceticism, but in the life of Godliness, not separating from life, but consecrating it; carrying a Divine spirit into every simplest act, accepting an invitation to a feast

giving to water the virtue of a nobler beveragə. For Christianity does not destroy what is natural, but ennobles it. To turn water into wine, and what is common into what is holy, is indeed the glory of Christianity.

The ascetic life of abstinence, of fasting, austerity, singularity, is the lower and earthlier form of religion. The life of Godliness is the glory of Christ. It is a thing far more striking to the vulgar imagination to be religious after the type and pattern of John the Baptist, to fast, to mortify every inclination, to be found at no feast, to wrap ourselves in solitariness, and abstain from all social joys; yes, and far easier so to live, and far easier so to win a character for reli

giousness. A silent man is easily reputed wise. A man who suffers none to see him in the common jostle and undress of life easily gathers round him a mysterious veil of unknown sanctity, and men honor him for a saint. The unknown is always wonderful. But the life of Him whom men called a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners, was a far harder and a far heavenlier religion. To shroud ourselves in no false mist of holiness.: to dare to show ourselves as we are, making no solemn affectation of reserve or difference from others; to be found at the marriage-feast; to accept the invitation of the rich Pharisee Simon, and the scorned publican Zaccheus; to mix with the crowd of men, using no affected singularity, content to be creatures not too bright or good for human nature's daily food and yet for a man amidst it all to remain a consecrated spirit, His trials and His solitariness known only to His Father; a being set apart, not of this world, alone in the heart's deeps with God; to put the cup of this world's gladness to His lips, and yet be unintoxicated; to gaze steadily on all its grandeur, and yet be undazzled, plain and simple in personal desires; to feel its brightness, and yet defy its thrall; this is the diffi cult, and rare, and glorious life of God in the soul of Man. This, this was the peculiar glory of the life of Christ, which was manifested in that first miracle which Jesus wrought at the marriage-feast in Cana of Galilee.

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XX.

[Preached March 20, 1853.]

THE GOOD SHEPHERD.

JOHN X. 14, 15. —"I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep."

As these words stand in the English translation, it is hard to see any connection between the thoughts that are brought together.

It is asserted that Christ is the good Shepherd, and knows His sheep. It is also asserted that He knows the Father; but between these two truths there is no express connection. And, again, it is declared that He lays down His life for the sheep. This follows directly after the assertion that He knows the Father. Again, we are at a loss to say what one of these truths has to do with the other.

But the whole difficulty vanishes with the alteration of a single stop and a single word. Let the words ❝even so " be exchanged for the word "and." Four times in these verses the same word occurs. Three times out of these four it is translated "and," — and know my sheep, and am known, and I lay down my life. All that is required, then, is, that, in consistency,