Apostle because of his faith in Christ; and this faith was the binding link between himself and the Christian mother. To us it might have seemed that, with the Church expanding around him, St. John's mind would have been wholly occupied with the larger interests of administration; and that he would have had no leisure to attend to the wants of individuals. And if St. John had been only a statesman, endeavouring to carry out a great policy, or only a philosopher intent upon diffusing his ideas, he would have contented himself, to use the modern phrase, with "acting upon the masses." But as an Apostle of Christ he had a very different work to do: he had to save souls. And souls are to be saved, not gregariously, but one by one. Each soul is the fruit, generally speaking, of much patient and loving toil on the part of some one Christian worker. This work is too great, too awful, to be done compendiously; there is nothing in the spiritual world which really corresponds to those inventions in machinery which supersede the need of individual hand-labour. Souls are saved in all ages through the earnest efforts of other souls, themselves illumined by Christian truth, and warmed by Christian love. They who are brought out of darkness and error into a knowledge and love of God and His Blessed Son, generally are brought, as were Timothy of Derbe, Lydia of Philippi, Philemon of Colosse, Kyria of Ephesus, and Phoebe of Corinth, by the loving interest and care of some servant of Christ. No philosophy can thus create and combine. The philosophers of all ages, even if good friends among themselves, can only set up a fancied aristocracy of intellect for themselves, and are very jealous about admitting the people into the Olympus of their sympathies. No political scheme can do this: history is there to answer. But love, with sincerity for its sphere, and with Jesus Christ for its object, can do it. Love did it of old, love does it now. But already I hear the retort which this assertion provokes. 'Do you venture,' some one says, 'to say that love still binds Christian to Christian, when our society is itself divided by the divisions of Christians, when the very world is deafened by the noise of Christian controversy? Do you suppose that your rhetorical pictures will for one moment stand the test of our actual experience? And if they will not, is it not imprudent to challenge a comparison between the ideal and the reality; between that which is before our eyes, and that which ought to be?' My brethren, I admit that within Christendom, within the Church, there are divisions, many and regrettable. But were there none, think you, at Ephesus in the days of St. John? Only read what he writes to Gaius, in his Third Epistle, about Diotrephes. But, you reply, are not our divisions more serious? Do they not at times deepen into a severance on fundamental points? So it was in St. John's day, at least in the case of Cerinthus and his sympathisers; for such there were still within the Church. Yet love, the love of the Apostle for all the faithful, the love of the faithful for each other, remained. True, we hear much and unavoidably of Christian differences to-day and the world anxiously chronicles our misunderstandings, if it does not exaggerate them. It says nothing of that which underlies them; the deep, loving, praying, working life of the Church of Christ. It photographs the spots on the sun's surface, but it says a 3 St. John 9, 10. b The teachers alluded to in I St. John iv. 1-3 must not be confounded with those in I St. John ii. 19. The former were still in communion with the Church: the latter had passed out of her. nothing of the sun. It studies the life of Christendom as a certain student is said to have studied the history of England: he confined himself upon principle to the great rebellion of the seventeenth century. It forgets that men do not quarrel about that which does not interest them, and that it is easy to be charitable when you are profoundly indifferent. But anything is better than the torpor of a materialised people, to whom God and eternity are as if they did not exist. If unity is better far than the misunderstandings of brethren, any misunderstandings are preferable to stolid unconcern about matters of the first importance. And as I have said, the relative importance of differences may be easily exaggerated. The surface of the Atlantic may be swept by a hurricane till its waves run thirty feet high. But a few fathoms below this agitation there are tranquil depths in which the storm is as unfelt as if all was calm, and which will be as they are when the tempest has abated. And, among the counteracting and restorative influences which carry the Church of Christ unharmed through the animated and sometimes passionate discussion of public questions, private friendships, formed and strengthened in the atmosphere of a fearless sincerity, and knit and banded together by a common share in the Faith of ages, are, humanly speaking, among the strongest. One and all, we may, at some time, realise to the letter the language of St. John to this Christian mother. Many who are here must realise it now. They have learnt to love in truth, not by impulse. They have learnt to bind and rivet their love by the strong bond of the common and unchanging Faith. All who know anything of Jesus Christ know something of this affection for some of His servants: some of us, it may be, know much, much more than we can feel that we deserve. May He of His grace VOL. II. nevertheless strengthen it; may He strengthen all love that is nurtured in an atmosphere of truth, and secured by faith in His Adorable Person and His Redemptive Work. For such love is not like a human passion, which dies gradually away with the enfeeblement and the death of the nerves and of the brain. It is created and fed by the truth which "dwelleth" in the Christian soul, and which, as St. John adds, "shall be with us for ever." It is guaranteed to last, even as its Eternal Object lasts. It is born and is matured amid the things of time. from the first it belongs to, and in the event it is incorporated with, the life of Eternity. But SERMON XXXII. FREEDOM AND LAW. I ST. PETER II. 16. As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, NT. PETER here touches a note which appeals to the human heart in all ages and everywhere. Freedom is one of those words which need no recommendation: it belongs to the same category as light, order, progress, law. It is one of the ideas which, in some sense or other, mankind accepts as an axiom; as a landmark or principle of healthful life which is beyond discussion. What do we mean by freedom? We mean the power of a living being to act without hindrance according to the true law of its life. A mineral, therefore, is in no sense capable of freedom; it neither grows nor moves; it does not live. A tree, in a very attenuated or in a metaphorical sense, is capable of freedom: a tree does contain within itself the mystery of a vital principle, which requires certain conditions for its necessary development: and thus we may speak of its having freedom to grow. The lower animals, in very various degrees, are capable of something which may with much better reason be called freedom; their capacity for it varies proportionately to their approach to |