the poor?" God forbid that I should say we are necessarily bordering on his feelings also. Such words may doubtless be used with sincerity; and because we really do care for the poor. But we ought never to employ them without carefully examining the source from which they flow; nay, more, without testing them by our actions also, and asking ourselves whether we are really devoting our talents, time, and money to the support of those objects which we bring forward in our words. If it be otherwise, and they are words of coldness and not of zeal, it would be far better for us to pray that the thought of our heart might be forgiven us, than to suffer Satan thus to clothe it in language, and send it forth into the world.

3. Such are the warnings that the office and the words of Judas afford us. Both were in themselves innocent, but in his case the one involved a continual temptation, the other was a deliberate act

of sin. There is, however, a third and yet more fearful warning to be gathered from his history, on which our Prayer-Book dwells. It can hardly be said to have preceded his last act of apostasy, so much as to have accompanied it. I mean his participation of the last Supper of our Lord. Before he sat down to that holy feast, he had made his covenant with the chief priests, and was seeking an opportunity to betray Him; but it was while he was there, that Satan entered into his heart; and it was when he went away from thence that the wished-for opportunity occurred. Thus the receiving the sop from our Saviour's hand would seem, in some mysterious way, to have filled up the measure of his guilt; and the grace of God, which, in spite of himself, had been so long sustaining his tottering steps, was then finally withdrawn. Doubtless the time had been, when his better feelings would have been awakened by such an occasion; but he had been so long accus

tomed to come with impure thoughts into his Divine Master's presence, that he had gradually ceased to regard Him with reverence and awe. He probably had followed Him to Jerusalem, and gone with Him to the upper chamber, and suffered Him to wash his feet, and partaken of the bread which He had blessed, and afterwards of the sop which He offered him, merely because he did not wish, by any external sign of difference, to betray his secret purpose. He would seem to have done it all as a mere matter of course, without, on the one hand, any wilful profaneness, or, on the other, a single feeling of remorse or alarm. It is important that we should bear this in mind, lest we mistake the nature of the warning that He gives us. The whole ministry of Judas does, indeed, warn us all to be very careful how we come with unprepared hearts to holy places and holy ordinances, till, from long habit, all feeling of their holiness is withdrawn. But the last act speaks especially to those who par

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take of the Lord's Supper, merely that the world may fancy it is well with them, while they are indulging in secret some unrepented sin. It is such persons as

these, that our Church, in her Communion Service, reminds of the warning of Judas Iscariot: neither will I now venture to apply it otherwise, than in her own most solemn words: "If any of you," she says, "be a blasphemer of God, an hinderer or slanderer of His word, an adulterer, or be in malice, or envy, or in any other grievous crime, repent you of your sins, or else come not to that holy table, lest, after the taking of that Holy Sacrament, the devil enter into you, as he did into Judas, and fill you full of all iniquities, and bring you to destruction, both of body and soul."

Good Friday.

THE TRIAL OF OUR LORD BEFORE PILATE.

"AND straightway in the morning the chief Mark xv. priests held a consultation with the elders and

scribes and the whole council, and bound Jesus, and carried him away, and delivered him to Pilate."

1.

28-xix.

"And they themselves went not into the John xviii. judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; 14.. but that they might eat the passover.

Pilate then went out unto them, and said, What accusation bring ye against this man? They answered and said unto him, If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up unto thee.

Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye him, and judge him according to your law. The Jews therefore said unto him, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death: