world where the mysteries of our earthly lot will be resolved, and God will vindicate all His ways to man. But what concerns us now is, on the one hand, the assurance that God has done it (whatever the stroke) and, on the other, the assurance that the Saviour is at hand to sustain His people even under the most crushing calamities. Your highest duty, your most priceless privilege, is to go and tell Jesus of your sorrow. There is no grief so deep that He cannot solace it; no heart so desolate that He cannot cheer it; no home so dark that He cannot irradiate it. "Only believe." Trust in His faithfulness, in His love, in His sympathy. All will hereafter be made plain. HENRY A. BOARDMAN, D.D. Blundering Wickedness, MATT. xiv: 10. "He sent and beheaded John in the prison." ONE sees to this day the ruins of the fortress where this took place. In Perea, east of the Jordan, on the borders of Arabia, in a wild, precipitous country, on the summit of an abrupt and isolated cliff, three thousand feet above the Dead Sea which it overlooks, stood the castle of Machærus, including within its walls the palace of Herod at one end of the ridge, and at the other the citadel or fortress, with its towers and dungeons, in which, in all probability, John was put to death. John the Baptist, at the age of thirty, after a brief ministry, fell into the power of the brutal tyrant who ruled over Galilee, and endured at his hands a cruel and tragic fate. The whole course of Herod's treatment of Messiah's forerunner illustrates the dull blundering and futile craftiness of wickedness. 1. Herod in his first act moves too late. He seized and imprisoned John intending a crushing blow against the good cause; but it was ineffectual. He was powerless even to hinder John's work. His blow was tardy. That work was secure -done, and not to be undone, The message had been delivered, the land stirred, the truth drilled in and hammered down. Soldiers, tax-collectors, scribes, Pharisees, the Sanhedrim, and great multitudes thronging the ministry of John, had received their portion of needful and medicinal truth, and it was now working in them. The new kingdom had been announced, the "Lamb of God" pointed out and made known to men, and Christ was already fully launched upon His ministry of miracle and teaching. Herod moved too late. The arrest of John gave the Tetrarch no control over his influence. It was out and abroad in the air. The reeds on the riverbanks against which John's camel's hair had brushed, and the garments of Christ when He came to be baptized, were whispering of it to every wind; the rushing waters of the Jordan, beside which John had baptized multitudes, were babbling about it at every ford and angle in all the plain. John's words were itching in the ears, stinging in the brains, pricking the hearts, and moving the tongues of thousands up and down the land. Herod might as well send an officer to arrest the atmosphere and lock it up within prison bars, or a band of soldiers with orders to capture the glittering galaxies that shine and flee like swarms of golden bees through the infinite meadows of heaven." 2. Even if the mighty revolution which was going on could have been stopped by imprisoning its agent and leader, Herod had seized the wrong man. Searching the person of this prisoner, the guards would not have found the keys or seal of the new kingdom anywhere about him, He had passed over the leadership to his successor and chief. The resources of the movement were not any longer in his hands or under his management. Herod's raid to capture the Baptist only brought in a scout who had been doing some reconnoitring in advance for the great Captainsupernumerary who was no longer necessary to the advancement of the cause. a The actual leader was off to the northward out of reach. The really formidable man, the only one whose capture could possibly have retarded the progress of the heralded kingdom, the man Christ Jesus, was working, unhindered, in the cities and villages of the land. The Messiah, claimant of all thrones and empires, embodiment and source of the influences which made Herod tremble, was at large, and with omnipotent deeds and miraculous words was spreading His truth and establishing His dominion. The stupid, Tetrarch had taken the trouble to arrest the wrong man, and his dull blundering neither gained him advantage, nor crippled in the least the holy cause. 3. In bringing John to his castle to confront his royal authority and answer for himself, he only gives the faithful, fearless prophet a chance to come to close quarters with him, and uncovers his heart to the sharp thrusts of truth. Capturing this man-of-war, the cruising of which about his coasts had troubled him, and lashing it alongside, he only rubs the muzzles of his enemy's guns, and exposes himself to a broadside which goes clean through him. Brought before a throned and purple criminal, there was but one thing for such a man as John to do, and that was to shake the lightnings of judgment in his bloated and licentious face. The stern prophet, like Elijah before Ahab, laid the lash promptly and heavily upon the shoulders of the crowned culprit, and flogged iniquity upon its very throne, until the coward conscience quailed, and the bleared eye fell before the awful majesty of judgment-day truth, "It is not lawful!" The ruler furnished a great opportunity to God's prophet, and he took it. From that day the hatred of Herod's vicious court, and the fury of the vile Herodias, in her unlawful place, were envenomed against John, and wickedness was stumbling on toward a crime surpassing all previous blunders. 4. Incontinent depravity reels through revelry to blood guiltiness. This Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, and vassal of Tiberius Cæsar, the Roman Emperor, having managed to keep his throne for over thirty years, was in the mood for festivity, and celebrated his birthday with a splendid feast. Little dreams John in the dungeon that the thread of his fate is caught in the movements of a pair of feet which in the presence of Herod and his guests are making flying rings upon the palace pavement. Strange entanglement of good and evil, mysteriously permitted power of the base over the noble, that the gliding feet of a dancing woman should be beating the dead march of a prophet's doom-that the mazes she marks on the festal floor should be as the meshes of a spider's web ensnaring to his death, without his fault, one of the greatest born of woman! dance of death it was, more horrible than Holbein has pictured. A The cunning Herodias finds her chance of bloody revenge on the denouncer of her crime, and bids Salome ask the head of John the Baptist. Herod, far gone in wine and passion, stains his hands with murder, to save fancied honour and keep a covenant with hell. And shortly in the banquet hall there is a spectacle unsurpassed for horror in all history. A foolish girl stands amid the gay guests holding the bleeding head of the Almighty's prophet on a platter. Of the infamous three "Which is that the spirit loathes And shrinks from most in that bad strife? Luca Giordano has given us clearly his answer to this question in his painting, which hangs in the National Museum at Naples. It is a picture of the presentation of John's head. The old sensualist looks at it with some terror of countenance and a gesture of aversion. Salome, beautiful and not altogether hardened, holds the platter with a frightened look, as if she were afraid of her awful burden. Only the heartless and abandoned Herodias wears a meretricious smile of brutal satisfaction, gloating over the closed eyes and bloodless lips which can no longer look and speak rebuke. Now that John is disposed of, Herod, after the shock of this John troubles Herod more now than when he was alive. The prisoner does not stay down in the dungeon, but enters the rooms with Herod, sits spectral at the Tetrarch's feasts, makes festival doleful as funeral, wakes him in the night, and keeps saying unpleasant things on the inner side of his ear. The ruler of Galilee and Perea is in such a state of mind that when he hears of strange things being done near or far he exclaims in a shiver of fear, "It is John. He has risen from the dead!" Who are victors : "The Martyrs or Nero? Or Socrates? Pilate or Christ?" Life Lessons in the Acts of the Apostles. Conscience-Its Perversions and Uses. ACTS xxvi. 9-11. "I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth, which things I also did in Jerusalem; and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests; and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them. And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them I persecuted them even unto strange cities." THIS is one of the after-looks of one of the largest-souled, big-brained, and widely-cultured men who ever lived. After-looks, as forward looks, are exclusively human characteristics. They do not belong to the animal, but to the spiritual nature. The animal acts, but does not know what it does. Man acts and knows it, and remembers it, and calls it up to a judgment seat, and passes sentence upon it. Regret, remorse, pity, repentance, and blessed, grateful approval are all born here, and have no place in the lower life. It is a part of the Divine endowment of every God-given spirit, and it entails these saddest and brightest experiences of our lives. The bitterness of Paul's feeling when-as he was perforce compelled to do-he took this after-look again and again, is indescribable. With the joyous brightness of heavenly exultation, he seems at times to soar away into the third heaven, and to be glorified in the kingly glory of his triumphant Lord; but he comes back to lie moaning on the cold unpitying ground, wringing his hands in nameless agony over bloody memories which threw the pall of darkness over his glowing spirit and his immortal hopes. The saintly apostle was Saul, the persecutor and murderer. In his solitary moments, and they were many-for all great souls must live apart, like the eagle on the loftiest crag the scenes of violence in which he had figured so prominently came back to him in all their vulgar hideousness; and he saw the pale faces, and the eyes full of beseeching tenderness, and the sweet resignation and patience of the holy women he had torn from their homes and their babes, and consigned to loathsome cells and torture worse than death, because they believed in Jesus; and he saw the young men in the pride of their strength whose lives he had blasted; and the venerable sages whose last days he had embittered, and cursed, and stained with blood; and the large heart throbbed with a remorse so sad, that instinctively we pity the crouching form, crushed by an agony too great for tears. When he was himself persecuted, and when he in turn became a prisoner-for the changes and retributions of life were consummated after the same fashion-these same recollections smote him and embittered his experiences, and in the exaggeration of a passionate self-reproach he styled himself "a blasphemer, a persecutor, and injurious," and wrote himself down for all the Christian ages "sinners, of whom I am chief." But the strangest thing of all here is what follows. Paul himself emphatically declares about these times and these facts that he lived through them and did them with "a good conscience"; that when he reviled, and persecuted, and blasphemed, and murdered the disciples of Jesus, he was simply doing his duty as he held it conscientiously to be; that he was doing God, and religion, and his country a noble service by such virtuous and commendable denunciations and bloody atrocities. We have here a man pursuing a wrong course with the idea that it is the only right one; a man of intelligence opposing with a bold front the most wondrous revelation and work of God, and all the while supposing that he was one of His most faithful and useful servants; a man working the most diabolical mischief which could be wrought in the Church of the Saviour, and supposing himself to have an upright intention, and to be flattering himself with the approval of his own conscience, and saying, "I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth, which things I also did." "I have lived in all good conscience unto this day.' But, notwithstanding this upright intention, notwithstanding the clarity of his moral judgment, and the approval of the inward judge, he found out that it was all a blunder and a crime from beginning to end; he found out that he had been gratifying a base and malignant passion; he found out that he had been a mad, wilful, and wicked fool; and he glorifies the mercy which forgave a wretched rebel such as he had been. Now, according to the common and current doctrine, Paul was no sinner at all in these circumstances, and did not need any mercy, for he had throughout acted conscientiously. Doing what he thought ought to be done, it is held that he could not be blameworthy; that he was virtuous and not vicious; that he was entitled to Divine acceptance, and worthy of Divine reward. I want to discover which is right: the common doctrine or the Apostle's experience. Had he the right idea of moral life, or was he blaming himself blindly and unnecessarily; and was his consciousness of sin in these circumstances a mere fiction; his dependence upon the Divine mercy a foolish mistake. The subject is a large one. I can but hope to throw out some suggestions concerning it which may be helpful to those who care more for living realities than the echo of dead traditions. This is a case in which conscience seems to mislead a man; if it were so, let us try to see how this happened and what it involves. "I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth." I. CONSIDER SOME IMPORTANT FACTS CONCERNING THE MORAL Every man has, in addition to the power of thought and will, in addition to the appetites and passions, a conscience; has, i.e., a power of recognizing a moral quality in his own action, and in that of others; has a sense of right and of wrong which differs entirely and in its own nature and exercises from every other faculty of his spirit. He thinks of things according to their physical qualities, proportions, and relations; he feels them to be beautiful or the reverse; pleasant or the reverse, desirable or repugnant. But he regards the actions of intelligent and responsible beings and the laws and requirements of God as, also, good or bad, just or unjust, right or wrong. The power which enables him to do this; the power by which he is related to the rectitude and holiness of God, and can respond to them; the power to recognise goodness and badness, is Moral Judgment or Conscience. This power is common to man, and is indeed essential to responsible manhood. Go where you will, you find some form of law, some embodiment of justice, some idea of acts as virtuous or vicious, some moral judgment. There are wide diversities among men as to what is right and what actually wrong, but none whatever as to the existence of right and wrong; none whatever as to the fact of moral qualities attaching to human doings. Conscience is a universal endowment. It discriminates the quality of every free act in all men. With this is connected the idea of obligation to do the right to avoid the wrong. The ought to be, and the ought not to be, are awakened in the very moment that conscience shows us the right or the wrong. We do not wait to discuss the question whether the one or the other will be advantageous to us, or the reverse. We are conscious immediately of a sense of obligation to do the right, to avoid the wrong. The reason for the doing is felt to be in the nature of the thing itself as right. We have an impulse to action from the voice within, which is the echo of the voice from on high, and we feel that we ought to obey. And this obligation of right is felt to be supreme over every other. It ranges high above passion, appetite, self-love, self-preservation; has a more commanding might and a greater authority than the strongest impulse of the other principles of our active and emotional life. Conscience, therefore, is related directly to the will. It moves at once with the impulsive force of a motive, and contents itself with obtaining its consent. Emotions are involuntary, and conscience does not heed them until at least the will has voluntarily yielded to them. But acts of E |