been in danger of falling out among themselves, and of cherishing grudge to each other. As a body they had acted weakly and unworthily towards their master: they had the painful consciousness of this. And when men are fretted and displeased at themselves, they are in a ready mood for finding fault with others. It is a relief to their chagrined minds, to find some object out of themselves, on which they may vent the keenness of their feelings; and the disciples might thus have embittered each other's minds by mutual reproaches when all were in fault.

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The message of our Saviour was happily adapted to countersuch tendency of feeling, and to prevent the consummation to which it would naturally have led. Addressing them all as brethren, and thus intimating his generous forgiveness of the wrongs he had sustained at their hands, he taught them to forgive each other, to cherish no grudge, to receive each other as brethren as he had received them. His message spoke the language of Joseph to his brethren: "Now, therefore, be not grieved nor angry with yourselves." It enforced Paul's injunction, "Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love." "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice; and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." It assured them that they all stood in a common relation to Jesus; that not one, but all of them were his brethren; that none such therefore were to be treated by them as aliens, with cold and unkind neglect, or assailed with ungenerous disparagement, or refused their sympathy and regard. It reminded them that as they had all need of forgiveness, and had received it, so ought they to forgive and love each other for Christ's sake.

The lesson was not lost upon them, nor did the instruction wholly fail of its effect. Their conduct towards the

gloomy-minded and incredulous Thomas showed that they both apprehended the meaning of the lesson, and acted in its spirit. He was absent when the Saviour first appeared to the apostles. Depressed and fearful, his mind agitated and apprehensive from recent occurrences, he would not believe the declaration of the other disciples that they had seen the Lord. He virtually told them that they were either leagued together to palm a falsehood on him, or half crazed had suffered themselves to be deceived by their imagination, and mistaken the dream of their own heated fancy for a reality. He plainly said that he did not believe a word they told him. Yet their meekness did not break down under this provocation. They bore with his obstinacy: they treated. him still as a brother, though in this a weak and erring one : they endeavoured to bring him to a wiser view of things in the spirit of meekness. They did not exclude him from their sympathy or their society, or treat him as an alien or an outcast. They exercised towards him the charity that beareth all things, and believeth all things, that is slow to think ill, or to give up hope.

But the instruction conveyed by Christ's addressing his apostles as brethren, notwithstanding their weakness, and what had been culpable in their recent conduct, applies to us as well as to them. If he forgets not, nor despises the humblest of his brethren, the meanest of the household of faith, we ought to imitate his example in this. We ought to receive those whom God has received, to receive those who are weak in the faith, but not to doubtful disputation: we ought to comfort the feeble-minded, to support the weak, and be patient toward all men. We are not to count as heathen men and publicans, and treat as such, those who are merely weak brethren. Their weaknesses and errors are not to shut against them our bowels of compassion, or to lead us to refuse them the sympathy of Christian feeling, the aid, counsel, and fellowship, which we owe

to them as brethren.

If remaining imperfections of character, if weakness of faith, if defect in some one or other of the Christian graces, justify us in treating as aliens those in whom they are found, then, alas, there will be many refused our sympathy and acknowledgment, whom God himself owns and honours now, and whom he will at last welcome to abodes of bliss on high. We should beware of slighting those who even now are watched over by the angels of God, and who at last shall shine in God's diadem of glory in that day, when God maketh up his jewels. We should suffer their present state, in which it doth not yet appear what they shall be, to borrow a splendour from their future condition to cover its meanness, and to atone for its defects.

This indicates the rule which should guide the Church of Christ in her admission to membership, and to the various Christian ordinances. These are designed for all the brethren of Jesus, and if, for any above others, peculiarly for those weak in the faith, as specially requiring the nourishment and support they supply. It has been justly said, "The ordinances of the gospel, under the agency of the Spirit, are the very means appointed for imparting strength, purity, and beauty to the soul; and to refuse them to a believer, because he is not altogether sanctified, is like refusing food to a child of the family, because he is weak and faint, and requires to be nourished with peculiar care. The point here to be ascertained, is not exactly the degree of the person's sanctity, but the fact of his being regenerated by the Spirit of God. Is his faith operative? Is his heart in its prevailing desires, changed from the creature to the Creator? Is he striving to keep the commandments of God from a principle of love? Is he disengaging himself from all his former companions and practices? If so, then he ought to be cheerfully welcomed into the fellowship of the Church, even though he should cross its threshold a weeping penitent, saying, with the great

apostle of the Gentiles, " O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

3. It intimated what Christ still was-a brother knit to them by the bond of a common humanity.

In the Saviour's person there was a mysterious union of seemingly opposite natures, and conflicting qualities. He was God and man, holding both in union, though these could not be, nor were confounded or blended with each other. As the soul in man-the spiritual essence, and his bodily frame, are linked in closest union, and yet perfectly distinct from each other in their essence and qualities-forming not one uniform compound, but a union of two distinct existences, so in the person of the Saviour, Deity and Humanity were united and yet distinct. According as his character and the circumstances of his life are viewed under one aspect or another, we are struck with the glory of the Godhead, or the weakness and suffering of Humanity, as displayed in him successively or coincident. Viewing him an helpless weeping babe, cradled in Bethlehem's manger, or increasing in stature and wisdom, or fainting and athirst in the heat of the sultry noon, in his journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, or weeping in affectionate sorrow at the grave of Lazurus, or expiring on the cross at Calvary, we recognize him as made like to his brethren, a partaker of flesh and blood, heir to the infirmities of the flesh, and subject to death, and exclaim, "This is the Son of Man." But when we behold him controlling all nature, making the winds and the seas obey him, accepting worship, forgiving sin, honoured by all Nature at his expiring hour, we are compelled to exclaim with the Centurion who stood beneath the cross," This is none other than the Son of God." There was then in Jesus a union of different natures and opposite qualities, which to a careless observer, or a heedless mind, might give rise to perplexity and confusion of idea, which, by such, might fail to be justly apprehended, and distinctly remembered.

The disciples were in no danger of forgetting that he was God. His daily assertion and assumption as belonging to himself, of what is peculiar to Deity, his acceptance of worship, his forgiveness of sins, his intuition of the heart, refreshed and deepened in their minds the conviction that in a peculiar sense, in a sense which could attach to no creature he was "the Son of God." Familiarity with him did not deaden their reverence. The expression "Son of Man," as applied to the Saviour, occurs between sixty and seventy times in the four Evangelists; yet in all these places it is used by Jesus himself; in none of them by the disciples, when addressing him, or speaking of him. Now, the abstaining from the use of this descriptive appellation, "Son of Man," by the disciples, when addressing their Master, or referring to him, and the frequent employment of it by Jesus, when speaking of himself, are both instructive. The one shows the deep impressions of reverence which were on the minds of the disciples from the display of their Master's glory, so that they felt as if there would be a want of propriety in their speaking of him, by an appellation that described him simply from his bumanity. The other shows the desire of the Saviour to impress upon the minds of the disciples the truth that he was man as well as God; that he was made like unto his brethren, that he was bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh; and that a partaker of their nature, and a sharer in their sufferings, he could enter into their feelings, and succour them when they were tempted.

The connection between them was thus endearing. They served a Master who, though Lord of Heaven and earth, and filling all space with his presence, was yet in voice and aspect, in heart and soul, a man like themselves; who, free from all sin, and sinful tendency of nature, from the slightest stain or imperfection, yet partook of suffering, was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and who could enter into their feelings, and sympathise with them amid the trials of