law is given him simply to reveal to him his sin and lead him to Jesus Christ.

An illustration which occurred to me many years ago will make this very plain. The law is our schoolChrist is the end of the

master to lead us to Christ.

law for righteousness to every one who believeth. Some years ago I went on a sleeping-car to Detroit. I awoke in the morning, after a night's sleep, and I found the car had stopped, and we seemed to have reached the end of our journey. I arose; I went out of the car; and to my immense astonishment I found that the car was right on the edge of an abyss. We were on a dock; our car was on the rails, and the rails went right to the edge of the water. There they stopped. A little movement might have precipitated us into the river; and I wondered that we should be in such a position, until I saw a great ferryboat coming up to the dock. On the boat there were rails, and the rails on the boat matched the rails on the dock. Our car was pushed over on the boat, and the boat and car together went across the Detroit River. In a little while we were in Detroit. That boat was the end of the track for getting us over the river; and just so Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. Just as that track on the dock depended on the boat as the only way by which it was to be completed, just so the law, with its track laid down for us to run on, points to Christ, its completion, as the only thing that can furnish the end toward which it looks. The law can never save us, any more than the rails on the dock could have gotten me over the river to Detroit. The law can never save me, but Christ can. The

law points me to Christ, and the object of the law to the sinner is simply to show him that he cannot save himself, and that he must look to Christ alone for salvation.

The last portion of the Epistle, the hortatory portion, sums all this up, and tells men that if they turn their backs upon Christ then they turn their backs upon salvation; that if they give themselves up to the law as the way of salvation they will be under obligations to do everything that the law commands; that they cannot be saved at all by law without perfect obedience to God; and that no one can present such perfect obedience. Then there are mentioned harmony, love, forbearance, and patience, as duties of the Christian, and with the mention of these the Epistle is closed.

Is it not a singular fact that there was such strife in the early churches with regard to doctrine? I have sometimes thought these strifes were permitted in the early church in order that we might have less strife among us; in order that some questions might be settled once and for all; in order that we might be freed from trouble and perplexity with regard to them.

Baur, the skeptic, thought Christianity itself originated in this strife. Ah, no; there was strife simply because there was something to strive over; there was a historical gospel for which Paul was fighting; and the strife originated simply because there was error coming in, which threatened to reduce to a new slavery those who had found liberty in Christ Jesus.

And so Luther found in this Epistle to the Galatians, upon which he wrote his celebrated commentary, his

chief engine in the great Reformation in Germany. He was so attached to this Epistle, it seemed to him so to express his own heart, he felt so deeply the value and need of it, that he called the Epistle to the Galatians "his wife." It was something as dear to him as life, something to which he was bound for all time; and he made the Epistle to the Galatians the source of a very large portion of his texts and his sermons.

In every generation of the Christian church there have been those who have been prone to precisely the errors that Paul is inveighing against in this Epistle. Ritualism everywhere is a revival of the evil which Paul denounces in the Galatians. Ritualism in its essence is the putting of some work, or ordinance, or performance of man, side by side with the simple work and power of Jesus Christ, as a means of salvation. Ritualism is some external ceremony, or ordinance, or work that man can do, as an addition to the one perfect sacrifice and atonement of Jesus Christ.

It is a very curious fact, is it not, that these two Epistles, the Galatians and the Romans-these antiJudaizing Epistles were written to precisely those people whom history has shown to have had the greatest tendency to these errors? Now, the Romans was written to whom? Why, to the Romans. And who is it, in history, that has been the greatest exponent of this Judaistic tendency, this putting works side by side with Christ as a means of salvation? Why, it is the Roman church. Paul seems, by prophetic insight, to have recognized where this tendency was to be the strongest, and so to have written his Epistle against this tendency to the Romans.

And, again, the Epistle that strives to win men over from inconstancy and fickleness to simple trust in Jesus Christ is written to whom? Why, it is written to Frenchmen. It is written to the Galatians, for the Galatians were the early French, the Galati, the Gauls.

The nations which have shown the strongest tendency to these errors are just those which Paul has singled out to be the object of these Epistles.

Remember the Old Testament law is outlawed. Men cannot be saved by works. Why seek the living among the dead? Why go back to the sepulcher in order to find our Christ? The Christian has a new life in Christ Jesus; and it is a new life given to us upon the simple condition of trusting in our risen Lord. Faith in him, and nothing but faith in him, is the way of life and salvation; and, therefore, what we need most of all is to take to our hearts this one great lesson, that unless we trust in Christ we can have no peace inwardly and no certainty of salvation. If works must mingle with Christ's methods as the way of salvation, no one can possibly have a sufficient and solid ground of confidence, because no one can point to works that are absolutely perfect.

Let us, then, once more confirm our faith in Jesus Christ, and in the sole efficiency and sufficiency of his way of mercy and salvation, by our study of Paul's Epistle to the Galatians.

THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS

THE city of Ephesus, where the church was situated to which this letter was written, was thirty miles south of Smyrna, in Asia Minor. It was surrounded on three sides by mountains, and upon the west there stretched away the blue waves of the Ægean Sea. Ephesus was situated upon a plain five miles long by three miles broad. It was in the way of commerce from the East to the West, from Asia to Rome. It had become, long before the time when our Epistle was written, a very great and rich and powerful city.

The remains of a theater which was open to the sky have been exhumed in these modern times, and the stone seats of that theater would hold an audience of thirty thousand men. But the most remarkable distinction of the city was that which made Ephesus to be Ephesus, as much as the university makes Oxford to be Oxford, the magnificent and vast temple that was erected there to the goddess Artemis, or Diana. The goddess, half Greek and half Oriental, was represented in the court of the temple by a strange, misshapen idol of many breasts, indicating the nutritive and productive powers of nature. That temple was one of the seven wonders of the world. It was four hundred and fifty feet long by two hundred and twenty feet broad. There was a colonnade of Parian marble, each column of which was sixty feet in height, and each of these was the gift of a prince. There were