who slander, and jeer, and ridicule, and oppress the children of God; remember, their Maker is mighty. They can not avenge themselves; they do not wish to; but remember, "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, saith the Lord." It may be with some of you who are persecutors of God's children, that the word has gone out, and if so, O man, thou shalt never enter into the promised land, because thou hast smitten that rock. Yet if thou art a persecutor, hear God's truth: Paul says, "I was a persecutor and blasphemer, yet I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief." Have you done it ig norantly? Have any of you been persecuting God's children, not believing them to be his, but supposing them to be hypocrites? Hear this! Return, ye persecutors, return, ye who have sinned willfully against God; with him is plenteous re demption; he is able to blot out your transgressions, and wash you from your sins; yea, he will pass by all your iniquities, receive you gciously, and love you freely, if you will cry unto him with your whole heart. O! believe me, there is no sin which can damn a man if he have faith in Christ; there is no crime, however black, which can exclude a man from heaven, if he doth but believe in Jesus Christ; but if thou goest still on to thy grave a hoary-headed sinner against God, how awful will be thy fate when the fierce lions of his venge. ance shall grind thy bones, or ever thou reachest the bottom of the den where thou hopedst to have destroyed Daniel. Thou shalt see him delivered, and thou shalt thyself be cast into the midst of demons fiercer than thou hast ever guessed, and flames more terrible than thou hast ever dreamed; ay, tremble; "Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.” May God bless what I have said, to your souls, for Jesu Christ's sake! SERMON XXI. A VISIT то CALVARY. "And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man !"-JOHN, xix. 5. I had been insinuated against Pilate, that he was in league with Jesus Christ to set up a new monarchy in opposition to that of Cæsar. In order to refute that accusation, Pilate orders Jesus to be scourged. The soldiers put upon his head a crown of thorns; they spit upon him; they pluck his hair, they buffet him; and when all these cruelties and insults have been exercised upon his person, Pilate brings forth Jesus Christ upon the balcony. Standing there, he addresses the people assembled in the street, tersely exclaiming, "Ecco homo," "Behold the man! This is the man with whom you charge me of conspiring against Cæsar. Is this how I would treat my accomplice ? Would I in this way exercise my kindness for one whom I intended to set up as Cæsar's rival? Do you fancy that here you see marks of honor? Is that purple robe of shame the purple robe of the empire which you say I wish to fling upon his shoulders? Are these my kindnesses to my friend ?" It must have been a very telling answer to their accusations; and they must have seen that a repetition of the charge would be a bare-faced falsehood Methinks, also, that Pilat had another purpose to serve by bringing up Jesus in this array of misery: he sincerely de sired to deliver our Saviour from crucifixion, and he thought that, blood-thirsty as the people were, their vengeance would be satisfied at the sight of their victim in this extremity of suffering and misery, and they would then say: "Let him go." "Surely," he thought, "it will satisfy them; though hey had demon's hearts, this might content them; though, like fiends, they thirst for cruelty, surely this were quite enough." But no; like the wolf which hath tasted blood, they were insatiable, and the very sight of his emaciated form, stained all over with the streaming gore, did but excite them the more loudly to cry: "Crucify him! crucify him!" We believe that one of Pilate's purposes was answered: the people no longer suspected him of being an accomplice with our Saviour. But the other purpose, blessed be God, was not accomplished; for if it had been, we had been unredeemed at this hour, and the sacrifice of Calvary had been unoffered for our redemption. We shall leave Pilate, however, and I shall endeavor, by the help of God, to stand in Pilate's place, and with an infinitely different motive, to say to each of you: "Behold the man!" And may our Master be with us, and, by his grace, reveal our Lord Jesus Christ, visibly set forth crucified among you! so that by the eyes of faith every one of you, whether you have seen him before or no, may now be enabled to look unto him who was crucified for our sins, who bore our griefs, and carried our sorrows! A view of Christ on Calvary is always beneficial to a Christian. We never hear a sermon concerning Christ of which we disapprove, however inelegant in its diction, if it be sound in doctrine. We never complain of our minister that he preaches too much concerning the cross of Jesus Christ. No; there can be no tautology where his name is mentioned. Though a sermon should be a mere repetition of his name we would rejoice to hear it, and say: "Jesus, I love thy charming name; The French king said of Bourdaloue, that he "would rather hear the repetitions of Bourdaloue than the novelties of another." So we can say of Jesus Christ, that we had rather hear the repetitions of Jesus than any novelty from any preacher whatsoever. O! how are our souls dissatisfied when we listen to a sermon destitute of Christ. There are some preachers who can manage to deliver a sermon and leave out Christ's name altogether. Surely the true believer will stand like Mary Magdalene, over the sermon, and say: “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him." Take away Christ from the sermon, and you have taken away its essence. The marrow of theology is Christ, the very bone and sinew of the gospel is preaching Christ. A Christless sermon is the merriment of hell. A Christless sermon is a fearful waste of time; it incurs the blood of souls, and dyes that man's skirts with gore who dares to preach it. But too much of Christ we can not have. Give us Christ always, Christ ever. The monotony of Christ is sweet variety, and even the unity of Christ hath in it all the elements of harmony. Christ, on his cross and on his throne, in the manger and in the tomb-Christ everywhere is sweet to us. We love his name, we adore his person, we delight to hear of his works. Come, then, to Calvary awhile, with me, that there I may say to you as Pilate did in his palace: "Behold the man." We would take you there for one or two reasons; first, to instruct your intellect; secondly, to excite your emotions; and thirdly, to amend your practice. For we hold that religion consists of three things: sound doctrine, affecting the intellect; true experience, dealing with the emotions; and a holy life, fashioning the outward visible practice of every-day existence. Jesus Christ will benefit us in all these three; and if by faith we are enabled to see him now, we shall go away profited in each of these particulars-edified in doctrine, blessed in experience, and sanctified in practice. I. First, we beseech you to "behold the man,” TO INSTRUCT YOUR INTELLECT. The first lesson I would indicate to you-for I shall not teach it, but leave HIM to teach it-is the lesson of the evil nature of sin. See there that man crucified, his hands extended. Do you mark the droppings of his gore? Do you see the thorny crown upon his head? Do you note the scars of misery upon him? Do you see his lacerated back as the wood doth tear it? Do you observe his eyes sunk in their ockets? Do you behold the dull, dead misery settled on his countenance? Do you perceive the acute, unutterable inguish which he suffers? Can you see him? If thou dost ee aright thou wilt see in him the evil of sin. In no other place wilt thou ever know how desperately vile sin is. This 18 the spot where sin committed its direst crimes. Sin is exceeding sinful when it is a homicide, but it is most sinful when It turns deicide, and kills its God. The vilest deed sin ever did was when it nailed the Saviour to his cross, and there let him hang, the murdered victim, the victim of our sin. Would you see sin? I might show you a thousand pictures of it. I might let you see fair Eden blasted and withered, with all its fruits smitten, the moisture of its trees dried up; its fair walks covered with the leaves of decay. I might show you a heavenly pair banished, with the cherubim behind them, driven out to till the ground whence they were taken; and when you saw that, you would execrate sin as a thing which drew the plowshare over paradise. I might make you hate sin, too, if I should show you, yonder, a drowned world, deluged by a flood. See there men, women, and children are sinking in the mighty waters-the deeps above and the deeps below are clasping hands. Did you not hear the shriek of the last strong swimmer in his agony, who has just now been overcome by the boundless, shoreless waves? Behold the earth dull and void, save where yon ark floats alone above the deluge. Do you require the cause of this desolation? What loosed the chambers of the great deep? What brought forth this destruction? Sin did it. And who smote Egypt at the Red Sea? What was that which devoured Sodom and Gomorrah and rained hail out of heaven upon them? What was that which swallowed up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and took them down alive into the pit? What was that which slew Sennacherib's host? What hath peopled death's dominions? Whence those skeletons and bones? Whence yon hearse and funeral? And what has builded' the gloomy chambers of Hades? What has made Gehennah hot with unquenchable ire? And what is that which hath given hell its everlasting torments, and furnished it with inhabitants beyond number, who live in eternal tortures and twist themselves on uneasy racks of unutterable woe? Sin, thou didst all this; therefore do we execrate thee; thou didst drown a world; thou didst lig the grave; thou didst pile the faggots of hell. We hate |