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token of friendship and tenderness from the Master and Lord, hardened the heart of the Son of Perdition, so that Satan entered into him, and he went out a conscious traitor. It tells us that even the eleven had their hearts hardened; so that at the Last Supper they were disputing which of them should be the greatest; so that they could not watch with Christ one hour during the agony; so that they all forsook Him and fled. But it tells us of a Love deeper than all this mockery, betrayal, desertion; of a Love brought out through them and by means of them. It tells us that in the agony and death of Christ the will of the Son yielded itself absolutely, unreservedly, to the Will of the Father; and that the whole of that perfectly loving Will shone forth in the acts and sufferings of a Man. It tells us, that with this sacrifice God is well-pleased; that this sacrifice is an eternal bond between the Creator and creature, which sin and death and hell cannot break. It tells that we may give up ourselves to God, and that His own Spirit, the Spirit in which Christ offered up Himself, will come down to consume the sacrifice. It tells us that,—whatever reluctance we may feel in ourselves, or see in our brethren,—there is a mysterious power which can make us willing; it tells that however hard our hearts may be, and whatever new hardness they may have contracted from God's own discipline and our refusal to understand it,—the divine Spirit of grace and discipline can subdue even all things to Himself. It teaches us to find something beneath all Pharaoh's hardness and our own,-something far beyond our faculties to understand or measure in the words, And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.'

SERMON X.

THE PASSOVER

(Lincoln's Inn, Easter Sunday, April 20, 1851.)

Lessons for the day, Exod. XII. and XIV.

EXODUS XIV. 13, 14.

And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will shew to you to-day: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall see them again no more for ever. The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.

THE feast of the Passover may have suggested very different thoughts to Israelites eating at the same table, partaking together of the lamb and of the bitter herbs. We may imagine two persons coming to it during the period of Persian or Roman ascendancy; both well instructed in the history of their country; neither of them indiferent to the events which they were commemorating,-patriots, and religious men. One may have fixed his mind on the destruction of the Egyptian firstborn,-upon the change in Pharach's mind from defiance to cowardice, upon his subsequent relapse, upon the overthrow of his hosts in the Red Sea. Such reflections were naturally suggested by the narrative; they could not be passed over by any reader of it; a deep moral surely

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lay in them. Yet one who was occupied chiefly with them would be likely to contract a vehement and ferocious habit of feeling; along with some hatred of oppression there would be in his mind a peculiar hatred for Egyptians; he would contemplate the Lord of all exclusively, or mainly, as an Avenger.

The other Israelite might consider that the service was instituted to remind his countrymen of their own exemption; to tell them that the destroying angel passed by the houses upon which he saw the mark of blood; to awaken their wonder that the Red Sea should have been made the instrument of their protection instead of their overthrow. In such feelings you will be disposed to recognise a more genial temper, one sensitive to present mercies; willing to forget, in gratitude for them, any darker events that were associated with them. But you may reasonably suspect that a leaven,-a very large leaven,―of self-congratulation and self-exaltation will have defiled this keeper of the feast. He will have been apt to look upon Israelites as possessing in themselves, for their own sake, some claim to the divine kindness and favour which other nations had not. If practical experience and a recollection of the Scripture history prevented him from seeing, in the people at large, any distinguishing merits, he may have discovered them in certain individuals for whose interest the Lord was so solicitous that He tolerated the rest, or permitted the faults of the one as a foil to the excellences of the other. Gradually he must have become by this process of meditation more exclusive, than even the man who started from a consideration of the divine vengeance. It will have been more necessary for him to dwell upon the curse of the surrounding people

and of his own, that he might understand the blessings and security of those who had a right to feed upon the paschal Lamb. And he will have lost the sense which the other had of the divine Justice, of God as a punisher of wrong-doing. The vision of a capricious being favouring one race or portion of a race, will have been all that he could take in; such a being will have become his God.

But is it not possible to conceive a third Israelite coming to Jerusalem from some distant heathen land, with a fervent desire to participate in the great national solemnity and thanksgiving, yet possessed by a spirit unlike either of these? In the country where he was sojourning he will have heard continually, of great avenging deities ruling the powers of nature, inflicting plagues and torments on men, -to be conciliated and propitiated by hecatombs of oxen, or by the more precious sacrifice of children. He will have felt that those who confessed these deities had hold of a truth; that to deprive them of it would have been to make them think that wrong was safe and would go unpunished. But he will have felt also how continually wrong was safe and did go unpunished through this very belief,—through the confusion of the people as to the nature of the evils which provoked the divine displeasure; through the tendency of the priest to represent the chief of these evils as offences against themselves, as omissions of some services which they had prescribed, and through their willingness to overlook or forgive positive injuries to individuals and to society if such services were performed. He will have seen how really the people hated the gods whom they worhipped in this character; how much it was the whole aim nd scope of their religion to provide escapes from them;

yet how much their own minds were fashioned by their belief,-how every day the lust of vengeance became their absorbing passion, how the relaxation of that vengeance must be purchased of them-just as the relaxation of the divine vengeance was purchased by base hypocritical submission, by flattery, by presents.

Such a Jew will, moreover, have been familiar with the notion of divinities who patronised particular soils and races; who for the sake of these favourites would manifest themselves in the hour of battle, would put on human shapes, would suspend the laws of nature; who could. be invoked as helpers and protectors in every emergency. He will have seen that this faith proved itself to have a foundation,-by the strength which it imparted to those who possessed it, by the courage with which they could struggle to the death for their hearths and homes, by the confidence with which they could go forth into other regions to spread the name of their tribe and of the God who watched over it. But he will have seen that the belief in a divine protector was gradually absorbed into a belief of the excellence and glory of the particular people whom he protected,—into a feeling that they were a law to themselves and might hold down all other people by their might; he will have seen that when they reached this period of declension they will have begun to lose their national unity and strength; that visible men will have seized the power which they had ascribed to gods; that those who had exulted in their intellectual superiority, or in their reverence for an unseen law, will have become slaves of brutal instincts, or a mortal tyrant.

A man who had contemplated the heathen divinities under both these aspects, or rather who, without any