nothing. If these tremendous sentences are believed at all by us, what means this languid, occasional half-hearted gaze upon Him? Surely if we believe them, we should never turn away from beholding that face, so gentle and so Divine, radiant with the brightness of God, and soft with the dewy pity of a brother and a priest !

Is your life in accordance with your confession? If not, what is the confession but a blasphemy or a hypocrisy? And what does it avail except to make the life more criminal in its forgetfulness of your Saviour? The inconsistent life silences the loudest profession, and chokes it even in the throat that utters it. It makes men begin by denying the honesty of the professor, and end by doubting the truth of the creed which he professed. Of all the eneries of the cross of Christ, none are so potent as those who, professing to be His friends, live in manifest forgetfulness of Him, His love, and His gifts, and "mind earthly things." Through such the name of Christ is blasphemed. "Wherefore, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession."

Let me end then, as I began, with an earnest appeal for more of the habit of calm, fixed meditation on the work and preciousness of our great High Priest. I would urge on you, dear brethren, and on myself, not to allow our minds and hearts to wander "after vanities, and become vain," but rigidly and watchfully to close them against the manifold distractions which in this busy age lay waste our lives. We need more-far more—still communion with our Master. For want of it our energy is feverish, our patience soon exhausted, our devotion

lacking in depth, our hopes in brightness, our whole lives in calmness. Dear brethren! by all these motives, so strongly woven together in the words of our text, and by many more, we are called to the constant effort to 'set the Lord always before us," and, turning our happy thoughts to Him even in the midst of our daily duties, to "walk all the day long in the light of his countenance."

Remember that vision on the Mount of Transfiguration, and let it be ours, even in the glare of earthly joys and brightnesses, to lift up our eyes, like those wondering three, "and see no man any more, save Jesus only.""Laying aside every weight, let us run with patience, looking" away from all beside "unto Jesus, the author and finisher of faith."

325

SERMON XXI.

THE LAST PLEADING OF LOVE.

MATTHEW XXVI, 50.

And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come?

WE

E are accustomed to think of the betrayer of our Lord as a kind of monster, whose crime is so mysterious in its atrocity as to put him beyond the pale of human sympathy. The awful picture which the great Italian poet draws of him as alone in hell, shunned even there, as guilty beyond all others, expresses the general feeling about him. And even the attempts which have been made to diminish the greatness of his guilt, by supposing that his motive was only to precipitate Christ's assumption of His conquering Messianic power, are prompted by the same thought that such treason as his is all but inconceivable. I cannot but think that these attempts fail, and that the narratives of the Gospels oblige us to think of his crime as deliberate treachery. But even when so regarded, other emotions than wondering loathing should be excited by the awful story.

There had been nothing in his previous history to suggest such sin, as is proved by the disciples' question,

when our Lord announced that one of them should betray him. No suspicion lighted on him-no finger pointed to where he sat. But self-distrust asked, "Lord, is it I?" and only love, pillowed on the Master's breast, and strong in the happy sense of His love, was sufficiently assured of its own constancy, to change the question into, "Lord! who is it?" The process of corruption was unseen by all eyes, but Christ's. He came to his terrible pre-eminence in crime by slow degrees, and by paths which we may all tread. As for his guilt, that is in other hands than ours. As for his fate, let us copy the solemn and pitying reticence of Peter, and say, "that he might go to his own place”—the place that belongs to him, and that he is fit for, wherever that may be. As for the growth and development of his sin, let us remember that "We have all of us one human heart," and that the possibilities of crime as dark are in us all. And instead of shuddering abhorrence at a sin that can scarcely be understood, and can never be repeated, let us be sure that whatever man has done, man may do, and ask with humble consciousness of our own deceitful hearts, “Lord, is it I?"

These remarkable and solemn words of Christ, with which He meets the treacherous kiss, appear to be a last appeal to Judas. They may possibly not be a question, as in our version-but an incomplete sentence, “What thou hast come to do"-leaving the implied command "that do" unexpressed. They would then be very like other words which the betrayer had heard but an hour or two before, "That thou doest, do quickly." But such a

rendering does not seem so appropriate to the circumstances as that which makes them a question, smiting on his heart and conscience, and seeking to tear away the veil of sophistications with which he had draped from his own eyes the hideous shape of his crime. And, if so, what a wonderful instance we have here of that longsuffering love. They are the last effort of the Divine patience to win back even the traitor. They show us the wrestle between the infinite mercy and the treacherous sinful heart, and they bring into awful prominence the power which that heart has of rejecting the counsel of God against itself. I venture to use them now as suggesting these three things: the patience of Christ's love; the pleading of Christ's love; and the refusal of Christ's love.

I. The patience of Christ's love.

If we take no higher view of this most pathetic incident than that the words come from a man's lips, even then all its beauty will not be lost. There are some sins against friendship, in which the manner is harder to bear than the substance of the evil. It must have been a strangely mean and dastardly nature, as well as a coarse and cold one, that could think of fixing on the kiss of affection as the concerted sign to point out their victim to the legionaries. Many a man who could have planned and executed the treason would have shrunk from that. And many a man who could have borne to be betrayed by his own familiar friend would have found that heartless insult worse to endure than the treason itself. But what a picture of perfect patience and unruffled calm