nominally Christian churches and congregations. The real opposition, believe me, is not between Establishers and Disestablishers, or Episcopalians and Presbyterians, or between the doctrines of Rome and of Geneva. It is not by their theories about the nature of the royal power, or the ceremonies which befit his court, that you can separate the friends from the enemies of the king. No; the articles of the Creed of AntiChrist are not those about which good and prayerful men may differ. They are embodied in those worldly maxims of which you have a type in my text,-maxims which our Saviour warred against till men crucified Him at Jerusalem, as the world, if such an one were to appear again, would gladly crucify him in Paris or in London. And that you may have strength and courage to follow Him in that holy war, study for yourselves what our Saviour said and did when He was on earth. Take your gold fresh from the Gospel mint. Beware of the spurious coinage of rusty phrases and worn-out controversies and denominational slang and emotional unreality, which the Pharisees and formalists of all times have offered in His name, and which they offer still; and regardless of anything that anybody can do or say, regardless of that conventional opinion

which to some weak natures is " more a god than any other God," regardless even of those errors in tact and prudence into which you are sure to fall, and of the use against you which will be made of such errors by all who in their hearts hate those who are ranging themselves on the right side in that eternal battle-train yourselves here, by being keepers of your brother boys, to be keepers hereafter of your brother men. And so shall He who keepeth Israel, who slumbers not nor sleeps, keep you in His everlasting arms with a love which is stronger than a brother's, and at last welcome you with the words, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

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III.

CONVERSION.

Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed."-GENESIS xxxii. 28.

WE

E must all recognise that our judgments about character are liable to be mistaken. And we also know that they are instinctive and inevitable. It is hardly possible for us to be fair, especially with our dislikes. We may make allowance for circumstances, we may listen to the arguments and assurances of those who know the person in question better than we do; but our feelings about people are apt to cling to us in spite of our better reason.

These feelings are also apt to cling to us in spite of changes in those against whom they are formed. I say "against," for it is a melancholy fact that it is human nature to believe more

readily in changes for the worse than for the better. Of course the less worldly we are, and the more like Christ, the more hopeful shall we be about character. Not hopeful, indeed, so long as people are cynical, or swaggering, or Pharisaical, for He never was hopeful in such cases; but when they are softened, anxious, earnest, we are far too much afraid of being deceived, or what we call "taken in," and so brought down in our own self-esteem, or in our reputation among others for wisdom and knowledge of the world. We do not see that it is really more in the spirit of our Master, as we can never attain to His infallible knowledge, to err twenty times on the side of being credulous about what may be merely assumed or passing signs of improvement in others, than once by our want of hopeful sympathy to offend, in the Gospel sense, one of those little ones, and possibly to break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax.

I think that, in this want of hopefulness about changes of character, we may have a clue to the well-known difficulty about Jacob. We can scarcely believe in any one changing as he did. The difficulty lies in this, that we have on the one side the undoubted fact that Jacob was God's choice. Not only is he the special

object of God's care and love, preferred and selected as the ancestor of His chosen people and of the Messiah, but we have the express declaration of the prophet Malachi, whose few recorded utterances teem with denunciations against deceivers and false-swearers and those who deal treacherously, and who especially honours that law of truth which Jacob so grievously violated, "Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated." And on the other side, we have the equally undoubted fact, that in reading that part of the lives of the two brothers in which their characters are most vividly contrasted, we cannot help feeling a strong liking for Esau, and a hearty detestation of Jacob.

We love the high-spirited and affectionate huntsman who comes home laden with the spoils of the chase for his aged father; we admire the self-restraint with which he abstains from taking by force a share of the pottage from his mean, stay-at-home, supplanting brother; and if we condemn the thoughtlessness with which he sports with his ancestral blessing, this feeling vanishes before our indignation at the criminal who plays upon his impulses, entraps him into sinful oaths, tells deliberate lies, made worse by the blasphemous cant in which he envelops