And if, on behalf of others, we are to appeal from our own censoriousness to the "Eye that seeth every precious thing," it is likewise permissible, on our own behalf, to make the same appeal against evil opinions that do us wrong, and repeat the Psalmist's prayer, "Remove from me reproach and contempt, for I have kept Thy testimonies."* There is indeed danger in ever appearing before the Searcher of Hearts with anything like a claim on his approval; and if it were on reviewing our account with him that we did so, we should be but as the Pharisee who stood up and boasted himself before God. The measure of his demand upon us is nothing less than the inward vision he has given us of the possible and the best; and of this we must be so conscious of falling far short, that we can come to him only with contrition, confessing that he owes us nothing, and that the approval we fain would ask is forfeited before we ask it.

But though we must be in the wrong with God we may be in the right with men. The measure of their legitimate demand upon us is not our own private ideal, but our common understanding with them, which is but a part of the former. And if, while we are conscious of faithful conformity with this standard, perhaps even of transcending it, they are so blinded by scorn and passion as to revile and disown us, it is not forbidden us to carry our cause to the supreme tribunal, and plead *Psalm cxix. 22.

our relative innocency before the face of him who "seeth every precious thing." In the heat of frightened prejudice or party resentment, men, it is true, insist on regarding the verdict of their court as final, and claim to deal with us as they please; and it fills them with twofold wrath to be told,-in answer to their cry, "Stone him to death," that there is a heaven open and an Omniscient Judge, who may turn their sentence of death into glorious life. All such trust in an eternal justice they treat with mockery, as a vain defiance of themselves, prompted by spiritual conceit and insolence,

-as an insatiable craving for praise, disappointed on earth and so feeding itself on pastures out of reach,or at least as a fanatic self-gratulation, dressed up in the disguise of piety. So let them rage: the moral universe is not yet surrendered to their mob-law; and all history, no less than faith, proclaims that the illusion of triumph is with them, and not with the victims whom they crush. It comes out at last,-nay, it is already seen in Stephen's dying look,—that it is not the self-assertive, but the self-surrendered will, not the blind and tricky conscience, but the simple and clear-seeing, that can disregard the stormy passions of the hour and fling themselves on the sympathy of an everliving Righteousness. And if it is permitted to the enlightened but baffled Statesman, when deserted and fallen from his place, to appeal from the voices of the moment to the judgment of more impartial times, with

what right can we call in question the loftier form of the same prophetic trust which looks to a present God rather than to future men? The martyr of conscience, -must he not know himself charged with a truth which is not his own,-with a sacred claim which he did not set up and of which he is an appointed organ? and when cast out on their account, whither shall he take them for hope and shelter but to the Everlasting Love that will not let them die? A guiltless exile in the world, may he not seek his last retreat and say, "I flee unto thee to hide me"? The secret belief that the Lord of conscience loves and accepts each faithful sacrifice is the ultimate and sufficient support of all goodness; dispensing with the chorus of approving voices; replacing all vain self-reliance with a Divine strength; and with the peace of a reconciled nature consoling the inevitable sorrows of a devoted life.

XIV.

Christ, the Divine Word.

I.

JOHN i. 10-12.

"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God."

We think of God as having always been; of everything else we think as having sometime begun to be. In order that anything should arise and show itself on the theatre of being, it is necessary that he should be already there; while of that presence of his there is no prerequisite: it is there on its own account; the condition of all things, itself conditioned by none. Wherever our eye may wander in the Universe, we meet with nothing but the transient and perishable ; every object lies between two termini, beyond which it is not found the stretch of duration which it occupies may be longer or shorter, measured off by the tick of a watch or by a pendulum that sweeps the milky way: but, sooner or later as we retreat back from the present,

we reach successively the birth-hour of all things, till the whole visible creation has been read off into annihilation. The generations of men, like the leaves deciduous with the season, have been chosen emblems of fragility in the poetry of every age. The whole life of the race, while it runs up beyond the dates of the historian, is recent in the chronology of the naturalist; and in every museum we see creatures older than our kind, huge heads that never turned to listen for the hunter's voice, and stony eyes that never looked upon a man. The "everlasting hills" are found to be but the newest fashion of this world; blisters of a cauldron still hot, overlaid by the various cake of the sea-bed. Nay, the very stars, brought into the focus of Science, are melted back into a nebulous infancy, and the heavens wax young as the fresh garment of the Eternal. God was there at the origin of each, so was he anterior to all; and we naturally think of him, as pre-existing while as yet there was no universe, as filling a vacant eternity and constituting an illimitable solitude. Probably, no such time ever was; and could we retire into that perspective till we had left behind object after object and at last emptied the theatre of whatever now stands there, we should find, instead of mere vacuity, some predecessor in its place, still carrying us another stage away, till forced to own that the energy of God is coeternal with his existence. Nevertheless, for our imagination it is easier and for truth of religion it is

As