peace; but the forms of wickedness toss and change like the deceitful sea. Measure not, then, your powers for good by the days of your weakness, when you set an evil example and earned the distrust and contempt of those very persons who lowered their standard of right a little, encouraged by you. There is light and health in the spectacle of a Christian life; every one will feel it, none will forget it. Only work your work as if it were that to which the Father of All had appointed you, remembering that the night cometh when no man can work. Saved by the Cross of Christ, live now by His Spirit. Try with prayer and humility to walk in the light of that most unselfish life. Live as one who seeks to find the saving of his own soul in the pursuit of good to others. Such a life is not silent, is not obscure: it proclaims in clear tones that there is a God over us, and eternity before us, and that sin is death, and the course of godliness life and peace. But in order to do, we must also be. Our Redeemer wrought, as we have seen, by the perfect holiness that was in Him, as well as by his preachings and journeyings. And the long preparation for His ministry, the lonely prayer, and the struggle with the Tempter, were therefore part of His work amongst men, although they went on in silence and apart. The period of His ministry grew out of, and rested upon, the longer season of self-communion. Let not the contagion of a busy and emulative age beguile us to believe

that outward work is the sole Christian duty. To look with faith on Him who died to save us to seek food for the life within by prayer and thought about holy things: even to work somewhat less that we may think and collect ourselves a little more, is the most pressing need of our generation. It is the first work of a Christian who would be a light to others to bear in himself the law of holiness, that all who come near may read it. Let him be pure and honest, and just, and a lover of God, and he is already active in his Master's service by the very influence of those gifts. He does not need to keep men at arm's length, lest they spy out his inconsistencies. His life will be simple, sincere, transparent. Everything about him, words and acts included, will show that he is a faithful disciple of Christ; and his light will indeed so shine before men that they will see his good works and glorify his Father which is in heaven on account of them.

SERMON XVIII.

(PREACHED ON THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER EAster.) *

FAITH AND SIGHT.

1 JOHN v. 4.

For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world:

and this is the

even our faith.

victory that overcometh the world,

ON the day when our Lord rose from the dead, He gave to His assembled disciples a proof that He was risen, by appearing among them. One of them was absent. Thomas was not inferior to the others in earnest devotedness; it was from his lips that those words issued in a moment of unusual peril, "Let us also go that we may die with him." But yet when the disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord," his answer betrayed a mistrust that ill became one who had been a companion of Jesus from the beginning. "Except I shall see in His

* Some thoughts in this Sermon are borrowed from Julius Müller.

hands the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe." A week later, as on this very day, the disciples were assembled again, and again did the Lord pass through the closed doors to meet them; but this time Thomas was present. This time the visit was to him; the thoughtful Master who had spent such pains on the training of the disciples, came to give another lesson to one of them that needed it. The hands and the side were offered; and his touch recognised the wounds in their ghastly reality, and he could not help admitting that this was indeed his Lord and his God. And we all recall the remarkable words by which Jesus at once rebuked and counselled him. 66 Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." These words, although they do not occur in the services of this day, belong to it in an especial sense. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." And the words I have taken from the Epistle put before us the same subject: "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith."

I. In what does the blessedness of faith consist? How does faith give us a victory over the world? When Thomas uttered those words of doubt, he was not indifferent to the world above; he had not forgotten his Master, nor ceased to love Him. His want of faith lay not on that side. His was a gloomy and desponding temper, and the horrors

that he had witnessed possessed him wholly, and left no room for more hopeful thoughts. Those nails that lacerated the hands which he had so often seen lifted to heal and to bless,—would the cruel wounds that they had made ever close again? That wound that gaped in the side of Jesus, out of which flowed the blood and the water, out of which would have passed the life of the Lord as well, but that he was dead already,-could aught heal it? Or could one rise, and walk and speak on whom these five seals of death were set in blood? Could that body, marred and wrung, torn with stripes, agonised with all the modes of pain, ever again be a tabernacle for the Son of God to dwell in? Thomas would believe it when his own eye and hand bore witness to it; but no lower evidence would expel the terrible realities that pre-occupied his mind. The world had, to all outward seeming, prevailed over the Son of God; it had certainly overcome the faith of His disciple. The wounds that the world had made on the person of the Saviour were real objects of sight; the evidence for them was real. But there were other and higher realities than these, if Thomas had possessed the faculty that apprehends them. The perpetual out-streaming of divine power which had marked the Lord's whole ministry, the voice at His baptism, the glory on the mount, His prophecies and promises of His sufferings and of His conquest over them, were facts, as much as were the tokens