with whom would you desire to be, in the moral value by which alone men's lives and actions should be tried, let alone any Divine interposition in their favour? with whom would you choose to stand-with Nebuchadnezzar, or with the Three Children? with Herod on the throne, or with John Baptist in the jail? with James II. in the Palace, or with the Seven Bishops in the Tower? with Pilate on the seat of judgement, or with Jesus at the bar of condemnation?

But perhaps you will say that, save in the words I have just used, there has been nothing about Christ in this sermon. There shall be something about Christ before we have done. And how? Because in this very history of the Three Children Christ is revealed. As Nebuchadnezzar gazed upon the flames, and saw with astonishment that the three remained unharmed, his wonder grew tenfold greater, when he became aware that with them, and guarding them from the fury of the flames, there was a greater, a more wonderful, a more than human Figure. 'Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.' It was the power of Christ, the Eternal Son of God, though as yet unrevealed to the world, that saved these His servants from the flames and amid the brightness of those flames,

:

the heathen king caught a momentary glimpse of the true secret which enables the servants of God to endure unharmed insult, and ridicule, and cruelty, and torment, and death itself. That secret is, the presence of Christ. It was written by Isaiah of God's people of old, 'In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the Angel of His Presence saved them;' and the same prophet had been commissioned to speak, as if in anticipation of the martyrdom of the Three Children, such words of comfort as these to Israel: When thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee; for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour.' Such words are fulfilled in the Person and presence of Christ. With Him, none can be alone or unprotected. He is with His people in the flames of the world's anger, for He Himself has felt these flames before, and in His glorified yet true humanity, He is, if we may so say, fire-proof. All, and much more than all that any of His servants can be called upon to endure in the way of odium or persecution, He has endured before them. If,' said He, 'the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you.' If the servants are cast into the burning fiery furnace, for the Master it was heated seven times more than its wont. And as that flame, fierce though it was, had no power to turn Him aside from His purpose, or make Him fail from the work which He had

undertaken, so that upon His sacred Body the fire had no power, nor the smell of fire had passed upon Him; so shall He preserve unscathed, if not unscorched, all who by faith keep alive the consciousness of His presence. But it is this only which will preserve them. Without Him we can do nothing. In our own cause and our own power we cannot resist the strength of temptation, nor keep our faith from melting in its heat: with His aid we can walk unharmed through the flames like the Three Children, singing our Benedicite Omnia Opera, our call to universal thanksgiving. And to most of us, too compliant and easy as we are, what is most needed to be remembered is, both that there is a fire to be endured, and that there is a strength in which we can endure it. And recollect, your main trial may come but once, and by that single test you may have to stand or fall. You may not have, like Cranmer, an opportunity of recanting your recantation, and thrusting the unworthy hand into the flames of a tardy self-revenge. Anyhow, once or many times, you must be tried like the Three Children. The work tried so as by fire' is the work that shall last; the gold purified seven times in the fire is the genuine metal. In this tried and purified faith, but in nothing less, the Christian shall approve himself before men, good or bad, here, and shall stand before his God hereafter.

260

SERMON XXI.

THE HOUSE OF WISDOM.

PROVERBS, ix. 1.

'Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.'

THE image here employed of house-building is one very common in Holy Scripture, and admitting of many uses and applications. The great varieties of houses which men build for themselves; the dangers and difficulties which attend the construction of them; the different uses to which they are applied, and the different characters of those who live in them; finally, their last stage of emptiness and decay-all these furnish various features which allegorise with exactness the changes and chances of this mortal life, and the fortunes of the human soul in its passage through its earthly probation.

If we look around us, all mankind seem to the eye of fancy to be engaged in house-building, with various degrees of success or failure, of enjoyment or discomfort. On one side we behold the house of Fortune, built by the lucky speculator or the

prosperous trader, spacious and gorgeous; but often, like a house of cards, tumbled by the first gust of misadventure into a heap of painted pasteboard. In another direction is the gilded summer-house of Pleasure, with its walls so daintily painted with all images of beauty, and its chambers stored with all objects of delight-but look again, and the winds of autumn are whistling shrill through its flimsy walls, and its thinly-clad inhabitants are beginning to shiver in the breeze. And there again is the modest dwelling-place of unambitious obscurity and domestic peace, with the wife like the fruitful vine upon the walls of the house, and the children like the olive branches round about the table. Yet even here the house may not always be so well built as it looks, and the dry-rot of family discord may be destined to make it almost untenantable. And there again is the lofty palace of Fame, its cupolas soaring high to heaven, and its long colonnades ranged with statues of the wise and the great-a splendid building, and one that all might envy, were it not that with all its grandeur it has no room for comfort, and with all its show of strength no guarantee that it will last another generation. And there too is the unfinished building of the idle and the disappointed, with its scaffold-poles that never come down, and its beams and cornices that never go up-till the scoffing by-standers, glancing from the unfinished masonry