little. We want none of the knock-kneed, nerveless, sentimental piety, which grows ecstatic in singing hymns on Sunday, and is conveniently blind to the injustices of earth and the inhumanities of man to man on Monday. The sort of religion which is put away with the Sunday coat usually resembles the Sunday coat in fitting ill, and looking like a genteel encumbrance; the religion we want is one that will stand the rough wear and tear of daily life. We want men who will do right though the heavens fall, who believe in God and nothing else, and who will confess Him though all men forsake them and despitefully entreat them. A new age is fast coming on us, and a better one, I think. That species of Puritanism which believes in justice, righteousness, and reality is rapidly passing into the ascendant, and will soon be the dominating force in national life. The philosophies and politics of mere expediency are crumbling into dust, and men are turning more and more to the law of Christ as the true code of government for men and nations. The new age will hate cant more than heterodoxy, and will use very searching tests to sift the chaff from the wheat in Christian profession. If will be a real age, and will demand reality; it will be a morally courageous age, and will demand courage in the followers of Christ. You, young men, are the natural heirs of that great age which is coming. The twentieth century is yours. You will march on when the flag has fallen from the failing hands to-day; you will be in the van of battle when the dust lies thick upon the faces of those who

now front the music of the guns! Therefore I adjure you to be real, to be true, to be brave, to be honest men and unflinching witnesses, to quit you like men and be strong. And if I have seemed to set before you an impossible ideal of Christian courage-oh! if we look with yearning eyes towards that ideal, but with a sickening sense of our own impotence to reach it—then I bid you to remember also that we do not adore a Christ who simply tells us what we should do, but a Christ who lives in our hearts by faith, and helps us to do all that He has commanded us.

IX.

2

THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS.

"He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was night."-JOHN xiii. 30.

'HIS history which lies behind these words is the

THI

saddest and most terrible in the annals of Christianity. We are most of us so constituted that we learn most quickly through the imagination; and that which the imagination has once bathed in its searching light the memory seldom loses. An ethical statement may be remembered by its epigrammatic force or clearness, but the history of a human life becomes woven into the very texture of our thought, and is never wholly obliterated. We best understand patriotism when we read the life of the hero, and faith when we study the martyr's farewell to life, and love when we recollect our mother's gentle ways, and self-forgetful toil, and nightly kisses. So, too, I think we shall best understand what is meant by deterioration of character culminating in crime and sorrow, not by any bare statements or appeals I might make, but by the living picture of a living man's downfall and despair. Just as Esau was the type of the fleshly man, waking up too late to the conviction of spiritual truth, so Judas

is the type of the partially-spiritual man, whose better nature is gradually sapped by evils imperfectly resisted, till the light of piety dies out, leaving the house of the spirit desolate and dark. The whole tragic story is summed up in this one dramatic touch of narrative, "He went immediately out: and it was night."

I desire, therefore, to trace the main outlines of this strange life, and to mark the moral issues it involves. It is a difficult and delicate task, for while no personality is more pronounced than that of Judas, none is more intricate and subtle. We have to grope in darkness or among half-lights to find the motives of the man, and, when his character is revealed, it is suddenly and for a moment only, in the vivid flash of some solitary and significant word; read, as it were, by lightning, manifest only to be withdrawn. He himself, like Esau, is one of the beacon-lights of history, casting far over the troubled waters of Time a lurid gleam, rising high above us on the solitary crag of this immortal remorse in dreadful warning. He who would approach the study of Judas therefore with bitterness, or contempt, or hatred, does ill; rather should he approach it with infinite pity, such as men feel when they see a great intellect warped, a splendid possibility blighted, a noble mind overthrown. It is thus Christ regards him when, with ineffable sadness, He dismisses him from the table of the passion, troubled in spirit because He knows the devil has overmastered one whom He had loved and trusted. It is thus Peter speaks of him without bitterness, or passion, or

angry blame; the whole scene is too tragic for anger, too intensely sad for posthumous reproach-“ he fell from his apostleship; he has gone to his own place." It is so we should speak of him : as a man and a brother, who suffered temptations which assail us, and fell, as the bravest might fall but for the grace and power of God.

First, then, let us glance at the Apostolic Life of Judas. It is obvious that Judas was once full of noble aspiration and pious thought. For what did it mean for a man to be an Apostle of Jesus Christ? It meant following Him who had no place to lay His head, contentment with houseless wandering, resignation to perpetual privation. It meant the renunciation of all the ordinary avocations of human life which command fame or fortune, wealth or honour. It meant that a man should be prepared to leave father and mother, the calm of prosperous days, the prizes of successful toil, the strife of secular ambition; or, to put the least evil last, that he should endure insult and ignominy, the proud man's contumely, the oppressor's scorn, the contempt of all cautious and sedate citizens, to whom the words and life of Christ were at best a sort of splendid madIt was not, perhaps, the narrowing of life, but it was the concentration of life upon a single purpose; and the effect of concentration is to intensify rather than to narrow life. And what bait had Christ to offer His followers? What was the earthly reward for this great renunciation? There was absolutely none, save His friendship; and the friendship of a forlorn man, a

ness.