lonely desert, not among the crowds of his fellowmen, that the prophet heard the rebuking question, 'What doest thou here, Elijah?' In such cases the question to be asked is, What is the price which I am expected to pay? What are the concessions I am asked to make? Are they, or are they not, inconsistent with Christian honour and sincerity? In order to win a seat in Parliament, or a place of influence among my fellow-citizens, must I pretend to believe what I really don't believe, and fall in with prejudices and passions which in my heart I despise? Must I join in popular cries only because they are popular, and flaunt in the borrowed badges of political partizanship, assumed only to gain the applause of the crowd? Or again, if I may be rich, must I to be so be dishonest? Must I condescend to tricks and shams and artifices, which I know cannot bear the test of the rules of Christian morality? or must I acquire my own wealth by the oppression of others, and build my fortunes on the crushed bodies of the weak, and the ground faces of the poor?

If in any such case the answer of the Christian conscience be an unfavourable one, and yet we go on, then we shall be falling down and worshipping Satan, we shall become servants of the devil, not of Christ. Satan sometimes tempts us with the idea that if we will only do a little evil now, a great good will come of it hereafter. Only think, he says, if by

a single act of meanness or dishonesty you can gain ten thousand pounds, what a deal of good you will be able to do with it! But here, as ever, he deceives us. The end will be, that when we have done the evil, we shall never do the good which was to have resulted from it; that when we have worshipped Satan, those kingdoms which we professed to win for God we shall keep only for ourselves. For the yielding to the suggestion of the Evil One so warps and spoils the moral nature, that the capacity for doing good, the spirit of generosity and of love, is destroyed in the heart. And then at last we find out, when it is too late, the real nature of the bargain which Satan has made with us. He places in one balance of the scale the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and in the other the little act of homage which he requires from you; and he shews you how trifling is that which you are to pay to him, compared with that which he will give to you. But in truth, on to your side of the balance you will have to fling that which, estimated by its value to you, will weigh down the other side ten times over; and that isyour own soul. What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?' To worship Satan, though it should be to gain the whole world, will be to lose our own souls; it will be, according to that old-world legend, which taught so wholesome a lesson, to sell our souls to the devil.

But as, by God's strength, we turn away from the tempting offer, with that insight into its real nature which Christ has given us, and as the Tempter leaves us for awhile, baffled and disappointed, then the answer of a good conscience towards God, like the angels which came and ministered to Christ, cheers us with an inward peace; and the Voice of the Spirit, whispering to our hearts the encouraging thought that we too shall be among the chosen, and not only among the called, enables us to press onward manfully towards the narrow gate, and to choose without a backward glance the steep road, which leads onward by the Mount of Temptation, and the Garden of Agony, and the Hill of the Cross, to the Paradise of rest, and to the Home whither Christ is gone before to prepare a place for us.

85

SERMON VII.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD.

Good Friday.

S. JOHN, x. 11.

'I am the Good Shepherd; the Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep.'

IT

6

T has been observed by those who have studied the history of Christian art, that until the close of the tenth century, the central Object of Christian worship was usually represented in painting as a very young man, with an expression of untroubled gentleness and calm resting on His countenance, and engaged in miracles of mercy. The parable of the Good Shepherd, which adorns almost every chapel in the Catacombs of Rome, was still the favourite subject of the painter; and the sterner representations of Christianity were comparatively rare. In the eleventh century all this began to change. The Good Shepherd entirely disappeared; the miracles of mercy were less frequent, and were replaced by the details of the Passion, and the

terrors of the Last Judgement. The countenance of Christ became sterner, older, and more mournful; and about the twelfth century this change became almost universal.' 1

1

Now this change in the popular representations of Christ is one that marks a corresponding modification of view concerning His work. In the earlier ages of the Church, though men questioned who Christ was, they do not seem to have asked precisely or definitely what He did-in what manner His work was efficacious for the world's redemption. This they accepted without question: and especially they did not ask what was the precise nature of the sacrifice which He offered by His death. But that close of the tenth century which I spoke of, is noted by Church historians to have been a time. when the more devout Christians were unusually impressed with a sense of the evils of the world in which they lived, and overwhelmed with a dark foreboding of some terrible judgement-a gloomy anticipation of some visitation even then impending over the world. A thousand years had passed since Christ was born, and the destined end of all seemed close at hand. At such a time it was natural that the hearts of faithful Christians should turn to the Cross of Christ, as they had never turned before; that they should ask what were their hopes in it, in what consisted its special

1 Lecky's Rise and Progress of Rationalism.