"This will show them

necessity in the wilderness? Did he say, how little they are and how unworthy to meddle with the administration of vast concerns"? We cannot tell what were his intellectual processes, but his heart was always at the front, his beneficence seemed to outrun his judgment-so he went unto the panic-driven disciples when they were tossed on the sea.

Jesus went unto them walking on the water. If this act stood alone, it might affright us. Do not read the miracles as if they were unconnected events-any one miracle will terrify you. You must read every miracle as part of some greater wonder; then it will come to you not with violent and mighty shock, and overthrow you by irresistible collision, it will fall into the rhythmic march of a life that could never be measured by the figured lines of human arithmeticians. Yet all past miracles are lost upon us : we must have a present miracle. The disciples therefore could not live upon the miracles of yesterday, they must have the miracle of that very particular hour. So must it be with ourselves -we cannot live upon historical wonders, we can only be nourished by daily revelations of divine power and continual manifestations of divine care and love. We cannot be saved by a cross eighteen hundred years old, viewed in the mere light of history; we are saved by a cross older than the foundations of the earth, yet new as the sin of this present evil moment. Jesus Christ must be the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world, and slain every day to our consciousness, our helplessness, our burning contrition and our penitence which cannot answer its own bitter prayers. Life is a continual miracle. The bread we eat is always broken by divine hands. We have so confused and huddled events as to forget their right succession: we are too frequently content to stop at intermediate causes and present agencies were we to search back the bread that is in our hand every day as to its history and its origin, we should find that it was broken by divine, all blessing hands, and is itself a miracle.

The disciples were afraid when they saw this figure, and cried out, saying, "It is a spirit." How we are frightened by a spirit! Whoever was quite comfortable even with a supposed ghost? Whoever was just where he would like to be when in the middle of a haunted house, without a man within a mile of him? Yet God is a spirit: we who would be afraid to go into a reputedly

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THE TROUBLING WORD.

haunted room and stop there alone one night, cry out sometimes in unbelief and foolish questioning, "Why does not God show himself?" God is a spirit. It is not enough to see the figure: the sight is often misleading: so the ear must be charmed-the voice can do what the eye fails to accomplish. So Jesus said, 'Be of good cheer, it is I, be not afraid." You cannot read the sermon-you must hear it. Some of us cannot read the Bible, we must hear it read by a sympathetic voice every tone of which is a subtle suggestion or a profound exposition. The eye is a deceiver, and is deceived every day, and there is no more mischievous sophism than the proverb "Seeing is believing." So it may be, but what is seeing?

The ministry of the human voice is of God's appointment. It charms itself into ineffable colouring, apocalyptic variety and suggestion, it booms, it whispers, it commands, it soothes, it thunders with strength, it prays with piteousness of sympathy. The gospel therefore is given in charge to the human voice. Preach the gospel-it never can be read, but in a secondary and introductory sense it must be heard. The voice of Jesus was recognized when his figure was indistinguishable.

Now comes the great If, that always lay in Christ's road like a preliminary cross. Peter answered the Lord and said, "If it be thou." That was the old If-it occurs in the story of the temptation, early in this same gospel. When the tempter came to him, he said, "If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made loaves." Now the senior disciple says, "If it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water." Beware of the doubting If Every man has his own test of deity. Peter had his little test. It was accepted, and Peter shows us here instinctively what is shown in every day's history of human life, properly read, that men when they have their tests accepted, are made afraid of their own tests, and sink in the very water they wanted to walk upon. Beware of setting tests for God; be on your guard against yielding to your own cleverness in setting traps for deity. Sometimes the Lord may accommodate himself to our absurdities of conception and desire. In this case, when Jesus said Come,' the proposition was Peter's, the test was Peter's, the failure was Peter's: he was afraid by the very manifestation of his own proofs, and ran away from his own test, like a man surprised in guilt.

What will Jesus do? He will save the doubter as well as the despairer. He saved the whole body of the disciples in their despair, he will save the single disciple in his doubting. So he must save us every day. Every day plucks me from the yawning abyss, every day I have the same mean coward's prayer to offer, "Lord, save me, or I perish," and he has the same great lordly reply of the outstretched and all-redeeming hand. That is the image of human life, that is the symbolism of our daily experience, our continual discipline, crying in the bitterness of despair, being answered out of the fulness of infinite love.

So

Then the result-“ Of a truth thou art the Son of God.". we are converted every day, and every day we sin. In the morning we write a great" If," in the evening we write a great creed. We never read yesternight's creed, we always begin with the morning's great If.

We may include the remaining three verses of the chapter, and say, in doing so--see how Jesus Christ goes to work again. He entered into the land of Gennesaret. The men soon had knowledge of him, and they sent out into all that country, and brought unto him all that were diseased, and besought him that they might only touch the hem of his garment, and as many as touched were made perfectly whole. Back to work again, on the mountain and in the city-these were the points between which that heart oscillated-longing for the mountain, drawn to the city, yearning for communion, yet devoted to beneficence, every day needing fellowship higher than the relations of earth could supply, and every day going down the mountain again to pick up the lonely one, to help the helpless, and to redeem with mighty heart, even with outflowing of sacrificial blood, every son of Adam.

DEFILEMENT SPIRITUAL NOT CERE

MONIAL.

Matthew xv. 1-20.

I. Then came to Jesus Scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, saying,

2. Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.

3. But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?

4. For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.

5. But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;

6. And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. 7. Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,

8. This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.

9. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

10. And he called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand:

II. Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

12. Then came his disciples, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying?

13. But he answered and said, Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up.

14. Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

15. Then answered Peter and said unto him, Declare unto us this parable.

16. And Jesus said, Are ye also yet without understanding?

17. Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?

18. But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.

19. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies :

20. These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.

OT often did Jesus Christ lose his patience, but when that

of very memorable words. We are sometimes warned not to provoke quiet men. Nor was this loss of patience in the case of Jesus Christ in any sense one of mere irritation or peevishness— it was rather a sense of moral indignation. The answer which he made to the Scribes and Pharisees who came from the metropolis was an instance of high, noble, moral resentment: it was not anger of a merely personal and selfish kind, it was a grave and solemn judgment. That the leading men of the day, the scholars and the clerks of the time, should be putting such trivial questions, should be mocking the spirit of progress by such frivolous inquiries, should be making such mountains out of such molehills, roused the divinest anger of an earnest soul.

Consider how this answer of the Saviour carries with it some profound suggestion of the supreme purpose of his life. He had not come down to make nice things, to arrange a ritual, to propose encroachments upon a ceremonial descended from the seniors— he came to save the world. Hence his flashing anger, his burning, scorching retort upon men who wanted to bind down his attention to the meanest frivolities that could engage the attention of the meanest intellects. From his answers to his opponents always learn something of Jesus Christ's main object in life.

The difference between the Scribes and Christ was that they lived in ceremony, and he lived in truth. Their religion was a trick in ritual-all religious observances and duties had been reduced to a mechanical standard and arrangement. With the Son of God religion was life, spirit, it was a vital principle, a divine inspiration, a continual drawing down from heaven of the energy and the grace needful for the work and the suffering of life.

Observe therefore that the difference between them was not literal and measurable in words; it was vital, final, and indestructible.

This is what Jesus Christ has to say to all opposing parties. He does not come as one of many, saying, Let us see where the exact point of rest is, as between us, controversialists as we are, each