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VOL. VIII.-NEW SERIES.

[AUGUST 1, 1865.

THE CHURCH.

"Built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone."

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"I come not to send peace on earth, but a sword."-MATT. x. 34.*

THESE are not words of threatening, but of warning. There is none of the ferocity of menace associated with the spirit of their utterance; they are simply designed as a calm and faithful explanation of what must of necessity precede the introduction of the principles of the Gospel amongst men. The "sending of the sword" amongst the people is not meant to be regarded as the object, but as the necessary result, of Christ's coming.

Christianity must struggle. So the Saviour intimates in the text: "I come not to send peace, but a sword." True, it is a message of peace which I bring; but it is a message at whose first utterance the whole world will scowl in rage and unbelief, and whose every repetition will be met with the counter cry of derision and scorn, and whose every onward step will be opposed by violence and hate. Many will be the swords which will be unsheathed against it. Ignorance will draw its sword, and brandish its vulgar blade against its heralds. Philosophy will draw its sword, and fence with cunning hand its homely thrusts. Pride will draw its sword, and haughtily cleave down its meek ambassadors. Selfishness will draw its sword, to sweep the intruder from its exclusive path. The passion, and the learning, and the pride, and the taste of men will in arms against it. Did not the event prove it so? How was its Founder received upon the earth? Was he welcomed as one who came to publish peace? Hunted in infancy by the tetrarch on the throne, opposed and persecuted through his ministry, the victim of the gibe, the stone, the whip, the sword, the cross, it looked as though he had come on an unpopular embassy. "To send peace on earth!" Nay, verily! The peace he offered so passed their understandings that men of every grade rebelled against it. As he passed along the street, the common peasant roughly hurled the stone, while the grave elder hid the pebble underneath his robe that he might aim it unseen. His sentence was not pro

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* From a forthcoming volume of Sermons.

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nounced by a biassed aristocracy, nor by an infuriated mob. It was not the language of a class, but of a whole nation, "Crucify him!"

And if this was how its Founder was received and dismissed, the earlier preachers of his Gospel fared but little better in the world. There is a noble army of martyrs who have fallen before this same sword. Apostles were shortly called to tread the footsteps of their Master, even when his path grew damp with blood. Good Stephen sank before the lawless rush of ignorance, spending his last breath, like his great Master, in praying for the throwers of the stone. The mighty Paul ran many a dangerous gauntlet amongst angry crowds, bearding the wild beast in the arena, and the wilder man in the street; "in dungeons often, in stripes above measure,' ,"till he found the same goal his Lord had found before him, at the cross. Rash, yet noble, Peter met the same end. His ready tongue found its quietus at the cross; and with his grey head hung downward towards the ground, and those pilgrim feet which had followed the great Leader over many a mile nailed to the higher beam, his was a lowlier crucifixion than that of the sinless criminal of Calvary.

And though the cross wore out of date, the plans of human malice waxed not old. The torture and the stake came into vogue. And now it was a double foe with which religion had to struggle. Not merely was it called upon to battle with its open enemies, but to suffer its cruelest opposition from its professed adherents. The basest and the bloodiest deeds were done by priests. Who built the Inquisition? Who arched its cells, contrived its racks, knotted its whips, lighted its fires, and upreared its stakes? It was the priesthood. Ah, sad relapse! sad complication of the struggle, when the vaunted vicars of the gentle Saviour let loose the blood of that Saviour's ministers! It was verily a profanely literal rendering of the text which drew the sword of persecution in the Saviour's name! Christianity never had reason to cry, "Save me from my friends;" but many a time might she have prayed, "Save me from the enemies who would wear my garb; save me from those wolves who clothe themselves in my sheep's clothing; save me from the conspirators who oppress, and persecute, and slay, in my gentle name." Our Cranmers, and our Latimers, and our Ridleys, and our Hoopers, and our John Husses, and all the brave nobility of God whose royal blood has sprinkled the charred stake, have been roasted in the name of Jesus. The darkness of the dungeon has been wrapped around the captive, and 'the twist of the rack has been grappled to the limbs of a thousand innocents, in the name of Jesus. And in this nineteenth century the Madiais were flung into the Austrian cell, chained from a liberty they had forfeited by no greater crime than reading the Gospel of Christ, in the name of Jesus. Surely there is no difficulty in finding illustrations that Christianity has had to struggle.

Nor are its struggles at an end. True, the cross is abolished, the stake is hewn down, the rack is broken, and the flame is quenched; but the enemies of the Gospel are not yet destroyed. In this gentler and less bloody day, when civil law flings a protective ægis around human life, and public progress and enlightenment insist upon the loosening of the chain from human consciences, the energy of opposition to the true Gospel

is well-nigh as great as ever. Fraud, not force, is the weapon now employed, and subtle strategy is used to cajole the minds which may not be coerced. Insidious error stalks abroad, and the meek and lowly One is shown in many a guise he could not recognise himself. In Christian colleges and Christian churches we have men striving to gainsay the inspiration of the blessed text-book of our faith, casting a slur upon the divinity of our glorious Lord, and paring away with the knife of stilted and pedantic logic the substitutionary and vicarious character of the great atonement. Not merely with rampant infidelity without, not merely with laughing atheism; not alone with frozen scepticism on the one hand, and fevered superstition on the other, has the Christian faith to struggle: but with hundred-headed error within the pale of her own professorship, with the hydra of affected innovation and rash discussion, with the tyranny of an unholy alliance with the State, and with the consequent evil of an overacted freedom, when the mind breaks loose and becomes licentious instead of free. She has to bear up against the relaxing influence of an obtrusive patronage which only saps her spirituality instead of breathing life. She has to stand before the morbid phantoms of sensationists who mistake riot for revival, and sound for soul. She has to live and breathe amidst the chilling influence of brazen speculation, whereby the shallow starers at a novelty are led away from the moorings of a steady faith, to drift after each juggler with arithmetic, and each groper amidst vapours of his own creation. With rashness, folly, ignorance, learning misapplied, irreverence, presumption, and all the many ills arising out of human pride and the limitations of human knowledge, has the simple faith of Christ to struggle. So that, with such an armoury of weapons employed in her miscalled defence, together with the many engines which her open enemies direct against her, well might it be said by Him whose pure religion was destined to stir manifold hostility, "I came not to send peace, but a sword."

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up such As with the nation, so with the individual. Christianity, in forcing its way into the human heart, has many a resisting power to overcome-has many a stubborn barrier to overleap. Self-righteousness, like some burly giant, spreads its lathy shoulders in the way, and will not yield. Worldliness, with bustling fuss, puts off the messenger with its tale of many cares and its plea of "a more convenient season. The one has no will to listen, but a determination to resist; the other has no time, and asks for a further and a further parley. And even when it is established in the heart, the struggle is not over. It is an ungenial encampment; there is mutinous dissension in the garrison. Christianity in its purity must find the human heart unhealthy and inhospitable quarters; for there is ever the innate corruption of the fleshy affections to offend the spiritual guest. It is an Arctic settlement-cold, dismal, bleak. There is many a chilly glacier to be thawed, and many a stunted grace to be developed, and many an unwholesome growth to be uprooted: even when seated, mistress of the human heart, she has to struggle with many hostile and subversive elements. So that whether in the great work of leavening the world; whether in making her incursions upon nations and communities; whether in conquering the citadel of the human heart; or in maintaining

her position of ascendency within that heart when once subdued; the work of Christianity is a ceaseless struggle. Her path is crowded with scowling enemies, who hate her approach, and who are jealous of her influence; and whose general resistance warrants the declaration of the text—“I came not to send peace, but a sword."

Thus, then, we see that on all sides Christianity must struggle. Do you ask, Why? The reasons are plain. Its spiritual claim conflicts with the carnal wishes and ideas of men. It asks too much of human pride, and grants too little to human vanity. It is a kingdom not of this world, and, therefore, disappointing to this world's expectations. The posterity of that race which had looked upon the golden mail of martial David, and the costly purple of imperial Solomon; whose eyes had been dazzled by the meretricious splendour of Belshazzar's state, and of Nebuchadnezzar's flashing pageantry; had been looking for the blazonry of a royal advent which should out-glitter all the sheen of their illustrious ancestry, and a throne which should overtower the seats on which their monarchs were exalted. Truly, they waited for an infant to be born; but they looked amongst the daughters of princes and of mighty men for its sign. They did not expect to be summoned to a stable, and to greet a peasant maid as the nursing-mother of their king. Their haughty pride revolted at the recognition of authority in a carpenter's son, and they could not bring themselves to think that all those burning prophecies of olden seers, that the oracles which had blazed upon Isaiah's awful scroll, and sounded in minstrelsy amongst David's strings and Jeremiah's numbers, were all fulfilled in that mellow blush of silver light about the baby-head which is lifted from the manger upon blushing Mary's breast. They looked for a king, and verily it was a king who came. They looked for a lawgiver, and verily it was a lawgiver who came. And though the king wore no robe of state like Solomon, a greater than Solomon was there; and though the lawgiver was girdled with no breastplate like Moses, a greater than Moses was there. But if, like those olden monarchs, the new king had come to the sound of sackbut and of timbrel into the streets of Jerusalem, would they have cried, "Crucify him," then? No; they would have danced to the bray of the trumpet, and shouted to the clash of brazen cymbal, as they hailed the ruler after their own heart. But when he trots into the city on a meagre palfrey-the colt of an ass-they leave it to the little children to cry Hosanna, and to sprinkle flowers on the road, while they retire in dudgeon to the temple and the judgment-hall, refusing their allegiance with the snarl, "We have no king but Cæsar." Yes; the Jew looked for a king, and was disappointed because there was no clumsy crown upon the head, and none of the millinery of mortality which men deem inseparable from royalty upon the form of the ambassador of Nazareth. And the Gentiles were equally disappointed: for, while the Jews looked for a king, the Gentiles were worshipping a whole Pantheon full of fabled gods, carved in marble, and cast in metal, and representing carnal pleasures, and presiding over a voluptuous destiny. But they turned away from the religion of Christ because it condemned their stupid homage, because it mortified the very passions they were pampering, and insisted upon the crucifixion of the lusts they had enthroned. And this is

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why the human heart rebels against it still. It does not speak the peace of acquiescence, but wakes the sword of opposition; because it lays a faithful sword at the root of all the lurking lusts of human pride. Christ gives us his Gospel, not to flatter, but to expose us. And the code he writes for us drags forth our follies into faithful day, condemns our practices, and demands the renewal of our lives. This is why we hate it: because it won't have us as we are; because it strikes at our pride; because it points us to the dust, and prescribes abasement and lowliness of heart. This is why it comes as a sword to our bones, piercing to the dividing asunder of joints and marrow, and discerning as evil the thoughts and intents of our hearts.

That sword is in your hand, my fellow-worker in the vineyard of the Lord, as you labour in social effort, and in Sabbath-school devotion. Ply it deftly. Ply it with your might; till stony hearts are cleft in twain before it. Seek no peace for yourselves; preach no peace for others, save as the condition of obedience to the power of this sword. For Jesus sends the sword on earth, in order that he may give the peace in heaven. We must be struggling now; we must be equipped in armour now; we must stand in the ranks now. O let us be struggling on the right side! Don't fight against God: for the sword you brandish against him must be broken; the mail you try to knit against his arrows must be pierced; the ranks which league against his army must be overthrown. Fight against the world; fight against the flesh; fight against the devil: and though the brunt be tough, and hard, and trying, the Captain under whose banner you contend shall lead you on to victory and rest; and as you take off the helmet for the crown, and lay down the sword of soldiership for the sceptre of the royal priesthood, your retrospect and prospect shall surge forth in the first ecstasy of your everlasting rest, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing."

SELF-TREACHERY; OR, THE DECEITFULNESS OF

UNBELIEF.

BY THE REV. W. POOLE BALFERN.

"How long dost thou make us to doubt" (or hold us in suspense)?—JOHN x. 24.

THE heart under the influence of sin and Satan has become one of the greatest sophists in the universe ; whenever it dislikes a thing it will readily furnish some reason why it should not like it; and this is preeminently true in reference to religion, and even God himself. We have a proof of this in the conduct of the Pharisees who rejected Christ. He

came among them, and "spake as man never spake," self-witnessing words; wrought miracles in proof of his Divine mission, and brought the evidences, means, and moral appliances of faith within reach, and yet they said, "How long dost thou make us to doubt?" All the sin belonging to their condition as despisers and rejectors of Christ they charged upon him, and

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