nature would wish to be and to do. They would be very annoying, no doubt, to the old nature which he has put off. They would exasperate what St. Paul calls "the old Adam, which is corrupt, according to the deceitful lusts.”a But they are acceptable to, they are demanded by, the "new man, which, after God, is created in righteousness and true holiness."b

Whatever a Christian may be outwardly, he is inwardly a free man. In obeying Christ's law he acts as he desires to act he acts according to this, the highest law of his life, because he rejoices to do so. He obeys law; the Law of God. But then he has no inclination to disobey it. To him, obedience is not a yoke. Disobedience would be a torture. His inclinations are in accordance with his highest duty that which emancipates him is itself a law. "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." He is, as St. Peter says to us to-day, a servant of God;d but then, as he would not for all the world be anything else, his service is perfect freedom.

The Antinomian plea that the rules and laws of a Christian life are an infringement upon Christian liberty is only a way of making Christian liberty a cloke of maliciousness. The care of conscience, regular habits of devotion, system in doing good to others, and in the disposal of time, caution as to what passes in conversation, avoidance of bad company, precautions against temptation; -these things are represented as inconsistent with freedom. Inconsistent they are with mere natural impetuosity, with a purely animal impatience of restraint, with that notion of human liberty which places it in the indulgence of the lower instincts and desires at the cost of the higher. True

a Eph. iv. 22.

c Rom. viii. 2.

b Ibid. 24.

d

I St. Pet. ii. 16.

freedom, let us be sure, consists in the power of acting without hindrance according to the highest law of our being. To do wrong does not assert our liberty. It degrades, it enslaves us. It may have been necessary that we should have the power of doing wrong, in order to do right freely. But none the less we forfeit freedom, if we do aught but right. A man is not really more free because he steals, because he swears, because he murders. This false notion of liberty is its worst enemy. Our highest liberty is secured by our free and complete obedience to every detail of God's eternal law.

Brethren, let us look up to our Great Emancipator. Our freedom is after all His gift: but He has left us the power, the perilous power, of forfeiting it, that we may, if we will, retain it for His glory. Let us see that we do not forfeit it by cloking under it the "maliciousness" which repudiates law. The laws of the land protect our social liberty. The Laws of the Church, the laws of natural and revealed Truth, protect our mental liberty. The Moral Laws of God protect our spiritual liberty. All true law meets in, radiates from, the Divine Person of Christ, the Everlasting Legislator, our Deliverer from political, intellectual, moral slavery.

If we repudiate law we turn His gift of freedom against Himself. If, through our willing obedience, we find in law the very countersign of our freedom, we are-and in this way only can we be-free indeed.

SERMON XXXIII.

JESUS THE ONLY SAVIOUR OF MEN.a

CERT

I COR. I. 13.

Was Paul crucified for you?

ERTAINLY this question was intended to startle St. Paul's readers at Corinth; and, no doubt, it did startle them. He is writing them a letter by way of answer to their inquiries; and he suddenly stops to ask them whether he, the writer, had been crucified for them. What was it that provoked him to use language so strange and paradoxical?

St. Paul had been told on good authority that after his leaving Corinth the Church in that place had been split up into separate groups; and that these groups named themselves, one after himself, another after the Alexandrian teacher Apollos, another after the great Apostle St. Peter, and a fourth even after Christ our Lord. These names would have represented ideas which ought never to be separated, and which in the present day we should call respectively Christian freedom, Christian philosophy, Church authority and organisation, and personal devotion a Preached at St. Paul's for the Bishop of London's Fund, April 25, 1880.

to Christ. But the Corinthians were Greeks, and they had carried some of their old mental habits with them out of heathenism into the Church of God. For ages the Greeks had identified each shade of opinion in philosophy with the name of an individual teacher. It was natural for them to look at Christianity itself mainly as an addition to the existing stock of thought in the world, which admitted of being treated as other systems which had preceded it had been treated. Moreover, it was true in the Apostolic age-as now, and always,-that Religion is differently apprehended and presented by different minds. But to dwell on different aspects of the one Truth is one thing, and to hold contradictory beliefs is another. To-day, on the festival of an Evangelist,a we are naturally reminded how differently our Blessed Lord's life presented itself to His four biographers: as the fulfilment of prophecy, as the life of the Ideal or Perfect Man, as the cure for human sin, and as the manifestation in the flesh of the Eternal Son of God. And in like manner to St. Peter the Christian Religion and Church appeared chiefly as a continuation of the Jewish, with some vitally important differences; to St. Paul, as the absolute reconciliation between God and man, intended to embrace all the nations of the world; to Apollos, as the solution of those many serious questions about human life and destiny which had been asked by human philosophy. The Life which the four Evangelists described was one. The Doctrine which Peter and Paul and Apollos preached was one. But different aspects of the Life and of the Doctrine recommended themselves to different minds. Thus in the teaching of the Apostles, as in the Gospel Narratives, there was an apparent diversity grouped around a substantial harmony; a harmony inspired by the Truth so variously appre

VOL. II.

a St. Mark.

Р

hended and described. The history of England is not less a single history, because one writer mainly addresses himself to the story of the Monarchy, and another to the social and material condition and development of the people, and another to our relations in different ages with foreign countries, and a fourth to the successive phases of art or of literature.

The fault then of the Corinthians lay in their treating a difference in the way of presenting religious truth as if it were a difference in religious truth itself. To them Paul, Peter, and Apollos were the teachers of distinct religions. Nay more, the holiest Name of all was bandied about among the names of these His servants and messengers; just as if all truth did not centre in Him as its Source and Object; just as if He too could be appropriated by a little clique, who prided themselves, no doubt, on not being party men, while they thus used the saving Name to cover the narrowest of the forms of Corinthian partisanship. Surely to St. Paul this degradation of our Divine Master's Name must have been unspeakably distressing; only less distressing, perhaps, than the position of virtual equality with Christ assigned to himself; as though he, an Apostle, were the centre and author of a distinct religion! Hence the pain which he feels, and which finds vent in the question, "Was Paul crucified for you?"

I.

St. Paul's question suggests first of all the difference between the debt which Christians owe to our Lord Jesus Christ and that which they owe to any, even the most favoured and illuminated, of His servants. And certainly it was no slight debt which the Corinthians owed to the Apostle. He had preached the Faith and had planted