acts. These organs are, no doubt, very closely connected witn the soul, which strikes its roots into them and acts through them. But, although closely connected with the soul, they are distinct from it: thought, conscience, affection, will, are quite independent of the organs which are dissolved by death. And it is impossible to see why the soul should put on a new character simply because it lays aside for awhile the instrument which it has employed during a term of years, any more than why a painter's right hand should forget its cunning because he has sold his easel, or why a murderer in fact should cease to be a murderer at heart because he has lost his dagger and cannot afford to replace it. True, at death, the ear, the eye, the hands, perish. But when they are destroyed in this life by an accident, does character change with them? The indulgence of the purely animal appetite may depend on the healthy condition of the organ; but the mental condition which permits, if it does not dictate, the indulgence remains unaffected. Principles of right action or their opposites outlive the faculties, as they outlive the opportunities for asserting themselves in The habit of thieving is not renounced because the right hand has been cut off; nor are sensual dispositions because the body is prostrate through illness; nor is evil curiosity because the eye is dim and the ear deaf. And when all the instruments through which in this life the soul has expressed itself, and which collectively make up the body, are laid aside by the emphatic act of death, the soul itself, and all its characteristic thought and affections, will remain unaffected, since its life is independent of its bodily envelope as is the body's life of the clothes which we wear.

act.

One Being there is Who knows us now, Who knows us perfectly, Who has always known us. When we die we shall for the first time know ourselves, even as also we are known. We shall not have to await the Judge's sentence; we shall read it at a glance, whatever it be, in this new apprehension of what we are.

It may help us, then, this Advent to think from time to time of what will be our condition in the first five minutes after death. Like death itself, the solemnities which follow it must come to all of us. We know not when, or where, or how we shall enter on it; this only we know-that come it must. Those first five minutes, that first awakening to a new existence, with its infinite possibilities, will only be tolerable if we have indeed, with the hands of faith and love, laid hold

on the Hope set before us,' in the Person of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour; Who for us men and for our salvation took flesh, and was crucified, and rose from death, and ascended into heaven, and has pleaded incessantly at the right hand of the Father for us, the weak and erring children of the Fall. Without Him, a knowledge of that new world, of its infinite and awful Master, still more of ourselves as we really are, will indeed be terrifying. With Him, we may trust that such knowledge will be more than bearable; we may think calmly even of that tremendous experience, if He, the Eternal God, is indeed our Refuge, and underneath are the Everlasting Arms. 1 Heb. vi. 18. 2 Deut. xxxiii. 27.

SERMON XXXI.

THE FUTURE CROWN.

(SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT.)

2 TIM. IV. 8.

Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, shall give me at that day.

WHE

HEN St. Paul writes thus, he is in full view of the end of his career. He is in prison at Rome, for the second and for the last time. He has already gone through a first trial, in the Forum, or public court of Rome, possibly before the Emperor, certainly with men of all nations and races looking on, assembled as they were in the great capital. On that dread scene, in those anxious moments, St. Paul was alone. No patron, in the legal sense, no man of influence, sat by to show that he was interested in the acquittal of the prisoner, or, at least, in seeing that justice was done to him. No advocate, trained in the technical knowledge or in the great traditions of the Roman law, was there to place his reading and his skill at the disposal of the accused. No humble friend, powerless to sway the will of the judge, or to arrange or to assist the argument for the defence, yet striving by kindly looks to assure the prisoner of the sympathy of at least one human heart among those around him, and to sustain him by doing so,—not even one such friend was near. There were still Christians in Rome whom the forecasts of approaching persecution had not scared away; but they too, it seems, were absent. Demas had fled, "having loved this present world."1 Titus and Crescens had left for the work of some Christian missions. But wherein these hours of sadness and depression-where was Eubulus where was Pudens, the rising soldier, as it might seem, and his

1 2 Tim. iv. 10.

2

2 Ibid.

highly born. British wife, Claudia; where was Linus, already Bishop of the infant Church in Rome, and as such working under the Apostles; above all, where was Luke, the beloved physician, who had remained in Rome to care for his great teacher's bodily health in these last days of anxiety and confinement? We know not; this only we know that they were not at Paul's side in his first public trial. "At my first answer," he sadly writes, "no man stood with me, but all forsook me I pray God that it be not laid to their charge.'

And yet he was not alone. One was there, unseen by the bodily eye, but clearly discerned by the eye of the soul, Who was at once Sympathizer and Advocate and Patron; One from Whose Presence the prisoner drew strength and boldness and inspiration; One Who so stirred him to speak, that the Faith was proclaimed by him again, and for a last time, in such wise that through their representatives all the nations of the world should hear it; and that, for the moment, even the heathen judge was awed before his victim. "The Lord Christ stood by me, and strengthened me; that by me the preaching of the truth might be fully proclaimed, and that all the Gentiles might hear and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.' This first trial resulted, in fact, in what the Roman lawyers called a 66 non liquet;" it was not plain to the judges whether the accused was innocent or guilty. And, as a consequence, the case was adjourned; adjourned, perhaps, indefinitely; adjourned, anyhow, until popular passions or imperial caprice might determine to bring it on again.

It was during this interval thus obtained that St. Paul wrote to Timothy about "the crown of righteousness." For himself, the Apostle was under no illusions whatever as to what awaited him. He had seen a great deal of Rome, with eyes sharpened by anxious waiting some five years before, and now he had scanned it for a second time from his Roman prison. He well knew what social forces were at work, what was the general drift of affairs, what considerations would come to the front in possible, or probable, or foreseen contingencies. He may well, too, have received some intimation from on high, as a last proof of the high favour of that Divine Saviour Whom he served, that the end was now very near, and that he must be ready for it. Even now he cries, "My blood is being poured out as if in sacrifice, and the time of my parting from earth is close before me. I have fought the good fight; I

have finished the course; I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, shall give me at that day."1

it ?

I.

"The crown of righteousness! What does he mean by

2

In nothing was the whole ancient world more agreed, than in viewing a crown as the symbol of honour, glory, or power. How it came to be so, or when, is a question about which much has been said and written, and with no great prospect of arriving at an answer. Probably the symbol would have been suggested by the genius of the human form itself. Very early in our history, human nature, we may well believe, wreathed rosebuds around the temples of the maiden, and bound laurels on the soldier's brow, and set a diadem of gold and gems on the head of the ruler of men. To the Jews, the crown was the most familiar of symbols. Their own monarchs long wore the crown which David took from the King of Ammon; their women, their bridegrooms, their priests, wore coronets, or crowns, or tiaras of varied form; and the great Asiatic conquerors, who trampled their civilization, and for awhile their religion, in the dust, were crowned also, as we know from their sculptured forms in our museums, and from the drawings which travellers have made of their palaces and tombs. "Thou shalt set a crown of pure gold upon His Head," is David's forecast for the great King of the future ; nor was the conception only Jewish or Oriental. In the games of Greece, crowns of parsley, of pine, of laurel, were awarded to the conquerors. Corruptible crowns," as St. Paul calls them, when, for a great moral object, he refers the Corinthians to scenes with which they had been familiar from childhood; 66 corruptible crowns," but not therefore, at the moment, less precious in the eyes of the men who won, and of the men who failed to win them. And thus for St. Paul, with his Jewish birth and education, and with his long and intimate converse with the Greek world, a crown was the natural symbol of triumph-of triumph recognized, approved, rejoiced in; and when he would think or speak of the state of the blessed, he weaves, as it were, moral beauty into the 2 Tim. iv. 6-8. 2 2 Sam. xii. 30. 3 Ps. xxi. 3. 41 Cor. ix. 24-27.

1

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