no reputation, and take upon you the form of a servant, so that, if you suffer with Him, you may be also glorified together.

III. Lastly, it may be asked, is it possible so to look on the things of others as to forget the things that are one's own? Is it possible so to throw oneself into the interests of others as to forget one's own? No, it is not possible; no more possible for the Christian than for anyone else. By the nature of things, I must be to myself the object of highest interest in the world; and my own happiness the thing of greatest moment to me. But see, my Brethren, how this is transformed, though not destroyed, for the Christian. I take that indi

viduality of mine, and by my Baptism, I merge it in Christ; I am lost, as it were, and swallowed up in Him-but it is only to receive back my individuality from Him transfigured and glorified. Still, my own individual salvation must be my highest object; but it is a salvation which I cannot work out for myself apart from the meanest and humblest of my brethren. I cannot seek to save others without setting forward my own salvation; I cannot seek to save myself without benefiting them. I am now enrolled in that society which absolutely scouts the idea of a selfish religion, a matter only between the soul and its Maker; I enjoy Sacraments and ordinances which have no Divine sanction, scarcely any conceivable existence,

except as the joint acts of a united body; I believe in and worship a Christ, Who came to redeem, not me only, but all mankind, and Who, if He did not do it for every one of them, did not do it for me; I belong to a Church, His mystical Body, in which whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it; and I hope for a heaven, the bliss of which if I do not share with millions of redeemed souls, then the darkest recess of hell itself would be a thousand times more endurable.

169

SERMON XIV.

THE BLIND MAN AT BETHSAIDA.

S. MARK, viii. 23, 25.

'And He took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.'

THE passage of which these verses form part,

gives us, like the conclusion of the preceding chapter of the same Gospel, an account of Jesus in the act of performing one of His works of wonder and mercy to relieve the sufferings of mankind. Then it was a deaf-mute, whose ears were opened, and the string of his tongue loosed, so that he spake plain. Here it is a blind man, on whose eyes the healing hands are laid, so that he is gradually restored, till he sees every man clearly. Both these miracles are related by S. Mark alone, and in both there are certain points of detail-parts, as it were, of the setting in which the miracle is framed— which we don't find in accounts of other similar works. To take this miracle of healing the blind man, you will observe in the text one of these

points of detail. Jesus took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town.' So again in the healing of the deaf-mute, 'He took him aside from the multitude.'

Now here, in the actions of Him Who we are sure never did the smallest act without meaning, there is, I think, something which we may all do well to think upon, and find out what it does

mean.

I. 'He took him by the hand, and led him out of the town.' Is it then the case that when God would confer any special blessing upon man, He must do it apart from his fellow-men? Is there something in the moral atmosphere of cities, where men are crowded together in masses, corresponding to what we find in their physical atmosphere: a clinging heaviness, a thick oppressive miasma, which sometimes makes even the strong weak, and which brings the weak to death's door: something which at every breath we draw into our lungs, which penetrates through the chinks and crannies of our closed doors and windows, and which even soils and pollutes the most cherished stores which we hoard in our locked chests and cupboards? Yes, it is true that there are certain peculiar influences for evil which exist in their fullest force only in those vast aggregations of human beings which we call cities; it is true that God made the country, and man made the town; and God's works

will always be better than man's. You find, both in the physical and moral world, that we are constantly needing to do to suffering humanity as Christ did to the blind man: 'He took him by the hand, and led him out of the town.' If necessity compels you to send your sick poor into hospitals built in the midst of crowded dwellings, because the remedy must be close at hand to the disease, yet you are learning every day more and more that if you would do your patient the greatest amount of good, and discharge him thoroughly cured, you must transport him, as soon as he is strong enough to bear the removal, to a freer and purer air. And ere long, we trust in God, the breezy hills of Surrey and the open pastures of Hertfordshire will be studded with 'Convalescent Hospitals,' daughters to those many noble institutions for the sick, which it is our happiness to possess in this city.

But this is not all. You say yourself that the escape for a few days, or even for a few hours, from the bustle and smoke of London, is a good thing for you. You make your children take it, even more than perhaps you are able to get it yourself. You send them to the sea-side: or if you can't afford that, you at least encourage the ramble to the open park or the free common, where bricks and mortar have not yet displaced turf and daisies. We sincerely commiserate the man too poor or too busy to be able to snatch even these short flights out of