XV.

GLORYING IN THE CROSS OF CHRIST.

But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.-Galatians vi. 14.

THE more we read St. Paul's writings, the more we shall be impressed with his liberality of mind in most respects, and the superiority of his religious conceptions to those generally accepted amongst the Jews and the early Christians. St. Paul was no \ party man; his mind was utterly alien from the petty spirit of sectarianism. He looked on sectarianism as a thing carnal, and opposed to the very essence of Christianity. He knew quite well the expansiveness of Christianity; he knew that it was a spirit, and not a mere code of ritualistic laws; that it aimed at making men free, and disdained to subject them to a new edition of the Mosaic law. St. Paul knew well that the Christian church, like the natural body, had many members, endowed with many various functions,

and that it was most unnecessary and undesirable to strive to eradicate fundamental differences of mental structure. He would not frown on any Christian work because they who did it followed not him. Enough for St. Paul if men followed Christ.

Judaising Christians might desire to have men circumcised, in order to swell the numbers and increase the importance of their own section of the church. "They desire to have you circumcised that they may glory in your flesh." But the spirit animating St. Paul was far different; he cared for Christianity far more than for any sect; he cared for the fundamental principles of religion far more than for any special manifestation of it. He loved the spiritual, the essential, and the permanent in religion far more than the formal, the accidental, and the transitory. Prophecies might fail, tongues might cease, knowledge might vanish away, but faith, hope, and charity must abide for ever. Christianity might change its external rites, its doctrines might be cast in new intellectual moulds, but its inner spirit could never change. The glory of the Cross would last throughout the ages; throughout all developments Christ would remain in his church. He would "be with it always, even unto the end of the world."

It is very greatly to be wished that men in our days would cultivate this religious liberality of St. Paul's.

Surely Christianity is something far larger than any external church or sect? Surely we know that neither on the Samaritan mountain nor yet in Jerusalem is Christ most acceptably worshipped, but rather in the sacred recesses of a pure and devoted spirit? Surely we cannot in our sober hours of reflection really suppose that God cares for our little sectarian differences, and loves us any the better because we belong to this church or that sect? Let us not glory in the mere accidents of Christianity, let us rather glory in its essentials. Let us learn some holier spirit than the coarse and vulgar spirit of sectarian acrimony. Let us feed our souls on something more nourishing than the miserable husks of theological controversy. Let us seek for the glory of the Cross, not amidst the harsh wrangling of angry disputants, but in quiet lonely communings with the Lord of truth.

If our very souls are sick and weary with the dust and din of man's ignoble strife about things vain which cannot profit, let us from time to time betake ourselves to the serene stillness of the mountain of the Lord-those grand primary truths of religion, which many now seem to ignore. Let us seek peace, not by accurately adjusting the claims of rival parties, but rather by leaving the turbid stream of modern theological ideas, and tracking its now angry waters.

to that sweet tranquil solitude from which they originally flowed.

Directly after his conversion, St. Paul conferred, not with flesh and blood, but betook himself for years to the lonely region of Arabia—a very significant fact, I think. It is in vain to seek peace and mental satisfaction from angry zealots; if we are to learn the profounder sort of truth at all, we must be taught of God, we must plead with God in the desert; we must realise our essential loneliness of spirit. Like Jacob, we must wrestle through the long night with the angel of God, and then from our solitude we shall emerge, like St. Paul, with a nobler spirit of religion than that which breathes in sectarian quarrels.

Oh, may God, in some high hour of spiritual enlightenment, show to us the real glory of the Cross, and then we shall indeed glory in nothing else; then to us the miserable controversies about the accidents of Christianity ever raging around us will seem infinitely contemptible; then we shall love Christ better than our own religious party, then with St. Paul we shall rejoice that Christ is preached, even though envy and strife be the base motives animating the preacher: "He must increase, but I must decrease." Let us rejoice that men are learning the deeper truths of religion, even though

at the same time they are unlearning our particular shibboleth.

In what, then, does the glory of the Cross consist? and why did St. Paul thus glory in the Cross, to the disparagement of all other things? St. Paul was not blind to the beauty and the glory of many other things besides the Cross, and he was very far removed from that puritanical spirit which looks with suspicion on all God's other gifts. St. Paul appreciated the glory of the external world; he thought that its beauty and harmony might have taught the Gentiles much concerning the Divine character. St. Paul by no means disdained human learning; he says emphatically that we should be men in understanding, though children in malice.

St. Paul did not despise mankind; he did not regard their virtues as merely "splendid sins," even though they had not attained the light of Christian truth; he did not seek to magnify God by reviling man; far otherwise, he deeply realised the potential glories of man's moral and spiritual nature. But, alas! in his own experience, he had realised man's weakness. He had looked below the surface of things, and had found a dire disease preying on the vitals of mankind. He had found discord marring the original harmony of God's creation. Beneath all