root, the spring, the moving power of it. After the critics have done with the Gospels what they can, no one will deny this: The sublime life of Christ and the sacrifice of Himself in death, had such an amazing influence upon His immediate followers, that in an enthusiasm of devotion, they spread themselves over the known world, declaring all He was, all He said, all He did, and requiring men. everywhere to submit to His influence. And, such was the power their representations had over men's minds, that everywhere they submitted to His influence, and formed themselves into corporations to maintain and promote the cause for which He had died. And this cause was that of a purer worship of God, of a purer mode of life, of gentleness, kindness, love,—of an absolute submission to the will of God. In less than a hundred years after, the Christians were found in all parts of the Roman Empire-they fought in the army, they swarmed in the cities, they were scattered in the villages. In less than four hundred years, they gave to the civilized world its sovereign-in less than six hundred years they dictated its code of laws. Then came the final triumph of the barbarians and the breaking up of the Roman Empire. But Christianity did not succumb to the barbarians; it converted them, and then step by step led them on through the dark ages, training them up to the Protestant reformation-up to the civilization of the nineteenth century. Now, I do not claim all this work for the influence of Christ alone. Causes had been operating in the same direction, through various nations, before He came. After He had come, Grecian, Latin, and then Teutonic influences, all lent their aid to the work. Literature, science, art, blended their mighty powers to help on the cause of human salvation, of human progress. But still, encompassing them all, giving loftiness, purity, impulse to them all, the beautiful, self-sacrificing, divine

Christ, in His life and in His death, was the primal motive power-the ever-renewing energy of the whole operation. He it is who has taught the nations that the merchandize of truth is more precious than that of rubies and fine gold, and that a man's meat and drink is, in all the forms of life, to do the perfect will of God. Seeing, therefore, that He has already done all this, is it not credible that He came into the world to save sinners?

But secondly, let any man, in thought, place himself in the presence of Christ, and out of the materials furnished by the Gospels and by the history of the Church, construct an ideal of His person and character; he will find himself drawn by the influence of Christ so exerted upon him, into such loving sympathy, that gradually the passion for truth and the holy determination to do God's perfect will, will grow stronger and stronger within him, and become predominant in his life. And this assimilating power is exerted by the Christ so comprehended irrespective of any doctrinal theories which may be formed of His nature or His work. A man may be a Trinitarian like Athanasius or a Humanitarian like Priestley; he may believe that Christ's sufferings on the cross were a price paid to the devil to let the saints go free, as some of the Fathers did; or that they were the means of appeasing God's vengeance against the sinner on account of the dishonour done to His law, as some Protestants have done; or, he may deem them the simple means through which God in the wise arrangements of His providence conveys His love and grace to men, as other Protestants do; and, he may eliminate the miraculous from the documents, as Strauss does, and reverence every word or letter of them, as being directly and unerringly inspired, as Gaussen does: yet, whatever his theoretical and critical opinions upon such points, if he only realize to himself the glorious, divine, ideal Christ as best he can, then, overriding all

his errors of judgment, all the fond and foolish notions he has yielded to, the divine power will come down upon him, making him ashamed of himself and his poor, selfish, sinful life, and impelling him onwards to all that is truest, purest, divinest, for man to attain. Nay, more; there will be awakened within him such a sense of God's presence, goodness, and purity, that his soul, rising to the heights of devotion, will at once enter into communion with God. And the devout, obedient life thus inspired, will become an impulse to everything else that is good. It will teach him to value all truth, whatever its form, because it is of God. It will give strength to his understanding. It will purify his affections from the love of evil in all the relations of life. It will become to him a constant stimulus to strive after higher and fuller excellences and forms of goodness. And thus, in all things it will tend to give him a nobler, better and more blessed life. Nor, do I say these things of the influence of Christ so realized and contemplated, upon a theoretical basis alone. Not only do the nature of man and its various laws explain to us the operation, but, the facts wrought into the experience of the devout verify the statement. Now, not less than in past times, men are yielding themselves up to the holy idea, and find themselves cleansed and saved. Ten thousand witnesses, of every shade of belief, testify to us, out of their own consciousness, that it is a credible saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

Nor may you imagine that you can accomplish the same end by forming to yourselves a perfect ideal of humanity independently of the historical Christ. The thing cannot be done. All our thoughts, all our conceptions, inherit the past, have grown out of, are composed of, the debris, the elements, of the past. The Christ of history will enter into our thoughts of divine manhood let

us do what we may. And besides, men need that shadowy form, looming out through the written and oral traditions and misrepresentations of the ages, to give substance and vitality to their ideal. True, we cannot know Him as those He lived with on earth did; we cannot imagine Him as the writer of the fourth Gospel did; we stand, too, aghast at the work we should have to do if we attempted to separate the real from the fictitious in all the Church has handed down to us about Him; but, notwithstanding that, His veritable features impressed upon the pages of the New Testament, and His divine inner life becoming more and more manifest as the power of it evolves the progress of Christian life through the successive ages, enable us to feel that it is no mere phantom we create for ourselves, when we clothe our ideal Christ with all the best, purest, divinest our culture furnishes us with. For is not that culture itself, with all it products, the outcoming of the spirit of that very Christ who lived in Judea? And, as I said, it is everything for us to feel that, we gaze upon something more than the creation of our own fancy-that, that creation is the shadow of one who veritably lived and died. He thus gains a power over us no mere ideal could. We feel the glow of His love, His goodness, His obedience; we respond—He lives in us and we in Him. O mighty energy of a real life idealized, to purify and ennoble the soul! Truly, it is a saying credible and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

I

THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

"Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."-JOHN iii. 5.

THERE is a great difference between the Christ set before us in this Gospel, and the representation given of him in the other three Gospels. Here you have one who is thoroughly conversant with the thought and speculations of the age, speaking in the language of the Alexandrine school, and discussing topics which agitated the minds of all spiritual philosophers. There you have the plain simple peasant of Nazareth, ignoring all such questions, inculcating the purest lessons of morality, regarding God with all the trust and simple-mindedness of a child, and teaching in the common, plain language of the country people. Commentators have explained this difference by pointing out that, those Gospels for the most part only give us the history of that part of our Lord's life which was spent in the rural towns and districts of Galilee, amongst unlearned peasantry, to whose wants He adapted himself; whilst this Gospel, for the most part, only gives us the history of that part of His life which He spent in Jerusalem, amongst the learned Rabbi and Doctors of the law. Whether this explanation be sufficient you can determine for yourselves; but I have referred to the fact of the difference for the sake of saying, that, I am persuaded