There are certain conclusions of great moment which arise out of this course of illustrative remark. One of these has respect to the dignity of Christ and to the importance of the work which he specially came into the world to accomplish. If John derived such singular honor from merely being the herald and harbinger of Christ-if to have been permitted to stand nearest to him in the grand procession of typical personages and prophets that had heralded his coming down through all the past centuries, and to have been the first to identify and proclaim him when he appeared, was enough to constitute him the greatest of those who had been born of women-then how great must Christ himself be! When we look on the long procession of kings and prophets that had been moving before him in stately majesty for so many thousands of years, we expect that the Being whom they shall at length introduce shall be immeasurably greater in dignity than any of them-that, in the highest sense, he shall be the Son of God. There would have been an inconceivable incongruity in the fact of so many prophets only leading in a prophet.

And surely the special work of such a personage so announced and introduced must be something unspeakably greater than a mere prophet's work, else why should not a mere prophet have been commissioned to accomplish it? We irresistibly conclude that, when such a personage came into the world, it was on an extraordinary mission corresponding to his dignity and power. And thus the belief of our Lord's divinity leads us by a strong presumption to the belief of his atonement, and both doctrines are seen to be necessary in order to harmonize the facts and statements of Scripture one with another.

And should it not be our habitual and earnest aim to have our dispositions and our lives brought into conformity with the principle we have been illustrating? Let us seek to become greatly good that we may become truly great. In the training and educating of our children, while we diligently and dutifully

exert ourselves to store their minds with useful knowledge, and to strengthen and discipline their mental powers, let us place far above this the educating of their hearts—the leading of them, with divine help, to be pure and truthful and benignant and devout and Christ-like-not so much to find them clever children as to make them good and Godlike men. There was not only a beautiful amiability, but a scripturally-enlightened appreciation of the highest form of excellence, in the saying of the late Dr. Arnold, in regard to one of his pupils who was somewhat dull and slow of intellect, but who dutifully did his best with the powers that God had given him, that he felt such sincere respect and even reverence for the boy that he could have taken off his hat before him when he met him.

But surely we may say to those who are satisfying themselves with aiming at some of the forms of a merely human greatness, "Where will ye leave your glory?" You cannot carry one of these things with you into the great world which is the goal of your earthly existence; they shrivel into nothing, like the dead leaves of autumn, when the winter of death approaches, and even intellectual gifts will only be of any value to you in eternity according as you have faithfully used them for God here. Oh, aim, then, supremely at that moral excellence which transcends every other kind of greatness as heaven is above the earth; for "greater is he that ruleth his own spirit, than he that taketh a city."

On one occasion, when the nobility of France were assembled to listen to the funeral sermon of the greatest of French monarchs, the preacher solemnly exclaimed, in presence of the inanimate body of him who, a few months before, had made the nations tremble, "Brethren, God alone is great," and then paused. And the preacher's words were true. God alone is great, and all the true greatness that can belong to any of his creatures must arise from their possession of Godlike qualities. Cultivate, then, like the holy Baptist, a spirit of moral in

trepidity, of self-renouncing humility, of filial trust in God. Learn to conciliate an enemy, and to

"Subdue your pride

To the forgetting of a wrong that whets

The sword to think on."

Lead men to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world, and then, like John, you shall be truly great, for you shall be "great in the sight of the Lord."

XXXIX.

PETER.

MONGST the mountains of Galilee, amidst the recollections of those heroic tribes who had once "jeopardied their lives unto the death" against the host of Jabin, under the very shadow of those ancient hills which had once echoed the triumphant strains of Deborah and of Barak, was nursed that burning zeal, that unbroken patriotism, which made the name of Galilean so formidable even to the legions of the empire. There, far removed from the mingled despotism and corruption of the schools and courts of Jerusalem, out of the country from which the chief priests and scribes were proudly convinced that no prophet could arise, we might fairly look for the freer and purer development of those older yearnings after the future, of that undying trust in the invisible, which had once characterized the Jewish race-for an ardent hope of the promised deliverance, yet not hardened into formalism by the traditions of the Pharisee-for a soaring aspiration after divinity not yet chained to earth by the unbelief of the Sadducees.

Such were all the Galilean apostles-such especially was Simon, surnamed the Rock. No priest of the house of Levi, no warrior of the host of Judah, ever burnt with more fervent zeal in behalf of God's chosen people; no prophet ever waited in more rapt expectation for the hope of the coming Deliverer, as it dawned upon him through the earthly images which bounded his imme