higher and unfailing standard, even the standard of the Divine righteousness and truth. He knows no higher than himself, and a world like himself. He may be a pompous and even a famous professor, but he is dark, dark, dark; he is his own god, and his only prayer is "with himself." But if a man will come to the light, will come with simple and earnest heart to God, to be judged, the first thing which he discovers is his sin. It is light which reveals darkness. It is when a man comes into the sphere of the Life and the Light, that he feels the deadness and darkness of his own poor heart. "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord," is the first cry of a soul coming forth into the daylight; which melts into the prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner." Then a blessed sense of communion with brother-men around him springs up within his heart. He has found what is common to man; common need of salvation from sin.

common sin,

"We cannot

spurn each

there is one

scorn each other, brother; we cannot other; we will not torment each other; enemy who is tormenting both of us. We can weep together, brother; we can pray together, we shall be saved together, and we shall live together, saved in heaven." Then the true fellowship begins, when souls are out of the darkness, in the light of God's grace and love. Then, " If we walk in the

light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship onc with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin."

The darkness isolates. The Pharisee is alone. He has never found the common term, " Father, I have sinned," wherein the human brotherhood subsists. "God, I thank thee that I am not as these men," is the only recognition of them which he vouchsafes. The habit of saying, The habit of saying, "I am holier than thou," the habit of comparing ourselves with those whom we may choose to brand as sinners, instead of with God, before whom we should find ourselves wholesomely on their level, easily hardens into a conviction of this kind, "I am of superior order, I am what these men never can be, my class is the elect band of the great human company, the rest are the dross to my gold, the chaff to my corn; the great assay of life but assures my privilege, and sweeps the mass with undistinguishing carelessness away." This is the Brahmun, the twice-born man of India; this is the Pharisee, the instructed man, the man separate by his knowledge of God and of the law, among the Jews. I will not follow him to England. Search and look, brethren; he is among us, as arrogant, lofty, and exclusive as ever; as despiteful to the morally sickly, maimed, and poor. The next step is an easy one. Men feeling that they are a class, a caste, of higher privileg

In

than their fellowmen, and of loftier destiny-the legitimate heirs of the kingdom, while the mass are but hewers of wood and drawers of water at the best-soon come to regard their pretensions and expectations as property, as precious possession, which any man who speaks to the poor in the common human tones, about the matters which are their peculiar charge, threatens to destroy. fact, it is an infringement of their monopoly, to bring down the Divine fire through any other channels, or conduct it to any meaner souls. And the penalty of the infringement is inevitably death. The man who recognises a common human nature, a common human need, and a common God and Father to supply it, is the only devil they know or believe in, and on him they concentrate all their malignant fury, to cast him out of their synagogues and to hunt him to death. If godliness be a life in the soul of which every man is capable, if God's grace and love be the bread of the soul, for which every man pines, and which can nourish every man unto life everlasting, then this Pharisaism must be a horrible mistake. "Away with such a doctrine from the earth," they cry; "Have any of the

rulers and the Pharisees believed in it?' If the man will not be silenced, strangle him, stone him, crucify him; away with him, away with him; he hath a devil, send him to his own place." The intense, the

frightful selfishness which grows up in the heart of the man who, walking in darkness and saying, "I have no sin," gives thanks to God that he is not as other men are, is, when we see it on the scale of a sect or school, one of the darkest things in the dark chamber of history.

The fury which seizes on an elect class, proud of their spiritual pre-eminence and power, when one outside the pale stands up and proclaims a common truth, a common need, a common Father's love, a light which lighteth every man, a home which is open to every returning step, has no parallel in the history of worldly frenzies and hates. "And the next Sabbath day came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God. But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming.”—(Acts xiii. 44, 45.) This is a clear exhibition of the spirit which I describe. The passage in Acts xxii. 19—22 shows as clearly how deadly is its hate. And the poor, who know only that they are sinners, and who watch wearily for any crumbs of divine comfort or gleam of divine hope which their saintly tyrants may condescend to cast to them, repay it at last with as intense a hate. I suppose that the Italians hate, or did hate, a priest much as the poor hated a Pharisee in Jerusalem. For these men dangle the

key of the gate of the kingdom within the clutch of the despairing wretches, and dash them back when they touch it, into the lairs of misery and despair. And this, brethren, is the spirit which hath no forgiveness. The sin which saith, "I have no sin," remaineth; even against God's love it is hard as adamant, and cold as death. The Pharisee's spirit, which would dash fiercely the cup of life from the lips of a dying world, lest its own privilege should perish; which would brand the spirit of the Divine Healer, Teacher, and Saviour of the world as devilish, and hunt it from the earth, stung to death with its viperous fang; which holds every wide Gospel proclamation an intolerable insult, and every healing touch of divine love a bitter pain; it is this, brethren, and nothing which a poor lost soul can brood over in its anguish, which is the unpardonable sin. This was the Python on which the sun-bright Saviour rained the arrows of His indignation and hate. "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how shall ye escape the damnation of

hell?"

The man whose lusts and passions are levelling him to the brute, heaven has hope of to the uttermost; but even the merciful Saviour abandoned as hopeless the man who was hardening himself into the fiend.

I will not attempt to apply the subject to men, parties, and organs in our own day. Perhaps,