They will give us right knowledge and good feelings, but not firm faith and resolute obedience. Christians, such as Mark, will abound in a prosperous Church; and should trouble come, they will be unprepared for it. They have so long been accustomed to external peace, that they do not like to be persuaded, that danger is at hand. They settle it in their imagination that they are to live and die undisturbed. They look at the world's events, as they express it, cheerfully; and argue themselves into self-deception. Next, they make concessions, to fulfil their own predictions and wishes; and surrender the Christian cause, that unbelievers may not commit themselves to an open attack upon it. Some of them are men of cultivated and refined taste; and these shrink from the rough life of pilgrims, to which they are called, as something strange and extravagant. They consider those, who take a simpler view of the duties and prospects of the Church, to be enthusiastic, rash, and intemperate, or perverse-minded. To speak plainly, a state of persecution is not, (what is familiarly called,) their element; they cannot breathe in it. Alas! how different from the Apostle, who had learned in whatsoever state he was, therewith to be content, and who was all things to all men. If then there be times when we have grown thus torpid from long security, and are tempted to prefer the treasures of Egypt to the reproach of Christ, what can we do, what ought we to do, but to pray God in some way or other to try the very heart of the Church, and to afflict us here rather than hereafter? Dreadful as is the prospect of Satan's temporary triumph, fierce as are the horsehoofs of his riders, and detestible as is the cause for which they battle, yet better such anguish should come upon us than that the recesses of our heritage should be the hiding-places of a self-indulgent spirit, and the schools of lukewarmness. May God arise, and shake terribly the earth, (though it be an awful prayer,) rather than the double-minded should lie hid among us, and souls be lost by present ease! Let Him arise, if there be no alternative, and chasten us with his sweet discipline, as our hearts may best bear it; bringing our sins out in this world, that we be not condemned in the day of the Lord, shaming us here, reproving us by the mouth of His servants, then restoring us, and leading us on by a better way to a truer and holier hope! Let Him winnow us, till the chaff is clean removed! though, in thus invoking Him, we know not what we ask, and feeling the end itself to be good, yet cannot worthily estimate the fearfulness of that chastisement which we so freely speak about. Doubtless we do not, cannot measure the terrors of the Lord's judgments; we use words cheaply. Still, it cannot be wrong to use them, seeing they are the best offering we can make to God; and, so that we beg Him the while to lead us on, and give us strength to bear the trial according as it opens upon us. So may we issue Evangelists for timid deserters of the cause of truth; speaking the words of Christ, and showing forth His life and death; rising strong from our sufferings, and building up the Church in the strictness and zeal of those who despise this life except as it leads to another. No need Lastly, let us not, from an excited fancy and a vain longing after the glories of other days, forget the advantages which we have. to have the troubles of Apostles in order to attain their faith. the quietest times we may rise to high holiness, if we improve the means given us. Trials come when we forget mercies; to remind us of them, and to fit us to enjoy and use them suitably. SERMON XVII. THE FEAST OF ST. PHILIP AND ST. JAMES, THE APOSTLES. THE GOSPEL WITNESSES. 2 COR. xiii. 1. In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established. IT has pleased Almighty God in His great mercy, to give us accumulated evidence of the truth of the Gospel; to send out His Witnesses again and again, Prophet after Prophet, Apostle after Apostle, miracle after miracle, that reason might be brought into captivity, as well as faith rewarded, by the fulness of His revelations. The double Festival which we are now celebrating, reminds us of this. Our service is this day distinguished by the commemoration of two Apostles, who are associated together in our minds in nothing except in their being Apostles, in both of them being Witnesses, separate Witnesses of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Thus this union, however originating, of the Feast Days of Apostles, who are not especially connected in Scripture, will serve to remind us of the diversity and number of the Witnesses by whom one and the same Sacred Truth has been delivered to us. But, further than this. Even the twelve Apostles, many as they were, form not the whole company of the Witnesses vouchsafed to us. In order more especially to confirm to us, that the Word has really become incarnate, and has sojourned among men, another distinct Witness is vouchsafed to us in the person of St. Paul. What could be needed beyond the preaching of the Twelve? they all were attendants upon Christ, they had heard His words, they had imbibed His Spirit; and, as agreeing one and all in the matter of their testimony, they afforded full evidence to those who required it, that, though their Master wrote not His Gospel for us with His own finger, nevertheless we have it whole and entire. Yet He did more than this. When the time came for publishing it to the world at large, while He gradually initiated their minds into the full graciousness of the New Covenant, as reaching to Gentile as well as Jew, He raised up to Himself by direct miracle and inspiration, a fresh and independent Witness of it from among His persecutors; so that from that time, the Dispensation had (as it were) a second beginning, and went forward upon a twofold foundation, the teaching, on the one hand, of the Apostles of the Cir. cumcision, and of St. Paul on the other. Two schools of Christian doctrine forthwith existed; if I may use the word "school," to denote a difference, not of doctrine itself, but of history, between the Apostles. Of the Gentile school, were St. Luke, St. Clement, and others, follow. ers of St. Paul. Of the School of the Circumcision, St. Peter, and still more, St. John; St. James, and we may add, St. Philip. St. James is known to belong to the latter, in his history as Bishop of Jerusalem; and, though little is known of St. Philip, yet what is known of him, indicates that he too is to be ranked with St. John, whom he followed, (as history informs us,) in observing the Jewish rule of celebrating the Easter Feast, and not the tradition of St. Peter and St. Paul. I propose upon this Festival, to set before you some considerations which arise out of this view of the Scripture history. Christianity was, and was not, a new religion, when first preached to the world; it seemed to supersede, but it was merely the fulfilment, the due development and maturity of the Jewish Law, which, in one sense, vanished away, in another, was perpetuated for ever. This need not be proved here; I will but refer you, by way of illustration, to the language of Prophecy, as (for instance) to the forty-ninth chapter of the Book of Isaiah, in which the Jewish Church is comforted in her afflictions, by the promise of her propagation and triumphs (that is, in her Christian form) among the Gentiles. "Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet I will not forget thee. . Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold; all these gather themselves together, and come to thee. As I live, saith the Lord, thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all, as with an ornament, and bind them on thee as a bride doth . . . . . The children which thou shalt have, after thou hast lost the other, shall say again in thine ears, The place is too strait for me, give place to me that I may dwell. Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, and removing to and fro? ... Behold, I will lift up Mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up My standard to the people; . . and kings shall be thy nursing-fathers, and their queens thy nursing-mothers." The Jewish Church, then, was not superseded, though the Nation was; it merely changed into the Christian, and thus was at once the same, and not the same, as it had been before. Such being the double aspect of God's dealings towards His Church, when the time came for His exhibiting it in its new form as a Catholic, not a local Institution, He was pleased to make a corresponding change in the internal ministry of the Dispensation; imposing upon St. Paul the particular duty of formally delivering and adapting to the world at large, that Old Essential Truth, the guardianship of which He had already committed to St. James and St. John. In consequence of this accidental difference of office, superficial readers of Scripture have sometimes spoken as if there were some real difference between the respective doctrines of those favoured Instruments of Providence. Unbelievers have objected that St. Paul introduced a new religion, such as Jesus never taught; and, on the other hand, there are Christians who maintain, that St. Paul's doctrine is peculiarly the teaching of the Holy Ghost, and intended to supersede both our Lord's recorded words, and those of His original follows. Now a very remarkable circumstance it certainly is, that Almighty God has thus made two beginnings to His Gospel; and, when we have advanced far enough in sacred knowledge to see how they harmonize together, and concur in that wonderful system, which Primitive Christianity presents, and which was built on them both, we shall find abundant matter of praise in this Providential arrangement. But, at first there doubtless is something which needs explanation; for we see in matter of fact, that different classes of religionists, do build their respective doctrines upon the one foundation and the other, upon the Gospels and upon St. Paul's Epistles; the more enthusiastic upon the latter, the cold, proud, and heretical, upon the former; and though we may be quite sure that no part of Scripture favours either coldness or fanaticism, and, in particular, may zealously repel the impiety, as well as the daring perverseness, which would find countenance for an imperfect Creed in the heavenly words of the Evangelists, yet the very fact that hostile parties do agree in dividing the New Testament into about the same two portions, is just enough at first sight to show that there is some difference or other, whether in tone or doctrine, which needs accounting for. This state of the case, whether a difficulty or not, may, I conceive, any how be turned into an evidence in behalf of the truth of Christianity. Some few remarks shall here be made to explain my meaning; nor is it superfluous to direct attention to the subject; for, though points of evidence seldom avail to the conversion of unbelievers, they are always edifying and instructive to Christians, as confirming their faith, and filling them with admiration, and praise of God's marvellous works, which have more and more the stamp of Truth upon them, the deeper we examine them. This was the effect produced on the Apostles' minds by their own miracles, and on the Saints' in the Apocalypse by the sight of God's judgments; prompting them to cry out in awe and thankfulness," Lord, Thou art God, which hast made Heaven and earth!" "Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of Saints!"* My remark then is simply this ;—that, supposing an essential unanimity of teaching can be shown to exist between the respective writings of St. Paul and his brethren, then the existing difference, whatever it is, whether of phraseology of subject, or of historical origin, in a word, the difference of school, only makes that agreement the more remarkable, and after all only guarantees them as two independent Witnesses to the same Truth. Now to illustrate this argument. I suppose the points of difference between St. Paul and the Twelve will be considered to be as follows:-that St. Paul, on his conversion, "conferred not with flesh and blood,† neither went up to Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before him ;"-that, on the face of Scripture, there appears some sort of difference in viewing doctrine between St. Paul and the original Apostles, that St. Paul on one occasion "withstood Peter to the face," and says that "those who seemed to be somewhat" referring apparently to James and John, "in conference added nothing to him,"‡ and St. Peter, on the other hand, observes, that in St. Paul's Epistles there "are some things hard to be understood," while St. James would even seem to qualify St. Paul's doctrine concerning the pre-eminence of faith;§ that St. James, not to mention St. John, *Acts iv. 24. Rev. xv. 3. + Gal. i. 16, 17. Gal. ii. 6. 11. |