St. Matthew heard and obeyed the call. No doubt before that day-marked for ever in his own life, marked for ever in the lives of all who should ever read the Gospels, before that day when he sat for the last time by the seaside to take the tolls and customs from the traders who passed over, he had heard of, and perhaps conversed with Jesus. He was His disciple before; Jesus would lay hands suddenly on no man; and now, when the call comes to higher things, he is ready. Jesus saith to him, Follow Me; and he arose and followed Him.

I am not aware that much more is known of St. Matthew than what I have mentioned. As an Evangelist he wrote the Gospel, and so his praise is in the Gospel in all the Churches. As an Apostle, our knowledge of his career is a blank.

One fact is recorded of him-Christ's call, and his obedience on this I wish to dwell; and especially as this is the Ember week, when candidates are ordained by the Bishop, to rise and follow Christ in the sacred ministry of His Church.

I have thought that historians sometimes do historical characters an injustice; certainly, you and I often do our neighbours one, by remembering one incident only, and telling one anecdote always of them, as if it were the key to their whole character, and of itself stamped the man irrevocably in the face of the world for good or evil; whereas they were many-sided, with virtues as well as faults.

This incident, let us recollect, however, is told by St. Matthew himself; and it is the only bit of autobiography he narrates.

He wrote his history long after this incident

occurred, and no doubt he felt it was not altogether an untrue index of what his career had been; it was a typical anecdote, and might stand in lieu of any other account of himself.

From it, then, alone we must gather our idea of him; and in doing so, gather lessons for our own guidance. He styles himself "the publican." In that name alone we see the host of difficulties which must have risen up to obstruct his giving himself to Christ. He was not one of the members of the great order of Roman knights, who singly, or in joint-stock companies, farmed from the Senate the right to collect the taxes from the tributary countries of Rome. He was not even like Zacchæus, a chief of the publicans: he was an underling; one who had to go to the working class Jew as he passed across the lake of Galilee, or entered the town of Capernaum with his garden produce and his poultry, and demand and finger the customs due. The knights were wealthy, and often grasping themselves, or connivers at their servants who were so; the chief publican of the district, Zacchæus, confesses that he had taken more than his due, sometimes by false accusation; can we then wonder that still smaller men should grind the faces of a conquered race, and have their pound of flesh that was in the bond and more? Certain it is that the publicans were in the habit of exacting more than the law appointed them, or St. John Baptist would not have reproved them for so doing.

What an atmosphere this to nourish the life of an Apostle of Christ! Money getting, little minute gains, little minute gains into which fraud and force so often

entered! If, as the Son of Sirach says, sin doth stick close between buying and selling; how should it not stick inevitably where the one party belonged to the subject race, and the other had all the soldiery of the conqueror at his back!

I cannot, however, but think that whatever were the usual faults of the publicans and their sins, Matthew had struggled against them. Extortion, exaction by falsely accusing before the magistrate, cheating-these had been as open to him as to others; but he had resisted the temptations, and so was already not far from the Kingdom of God. If there was to be one cheat, one fraudulent one among the twelve Apostles, surely Matthew was the man whom his antecedents pointed out as such. In fact, however, it was not Matthew the publican, it was Judas Iscariot who was a thief!

On the other hand, it is quite possible that owing to his having been guilty of the sins to which his order was liable, and Christ's having awakened his slumbering conscience by some powerful word, the recoil of a true repentance, through the grace of God, made him once and for ever to hate and to forsake his sins, and walk henceforth in the path of virtue.

Here I think we may learn a lesson; professional men especially, such as a clergyman, a lawyer, a public servant of the government, or of the municipality, those to whom law or custom allows certain fees and dues of definite amount; or who have to gather rates and taxes at a fixed sum. The great sin of the publicans was that they looked only to themselves and their own aggrandisement, without ever casting a glance to see how their conduct would

affect those over whom the law placed them in this respect. So the professional man ought to be very careful, not only that he does not misrepresent to persons unaccustomed to the matter the amount due to him, but that he really does fulfil the duty for which the fee is considered to be a payment. These publicans brought Roman Government into disrepute, and helped to undermine its stability. No government, no profession, no calling can afford to array against it, and justly so, the public feeling of its subjects or its countrymen by such acts of maladministration. It must lead to a fall.

II. But there was a second obstruction—social this, and not personal-which must have been a great barrier to Matthew's coming to Jesus, viz., the bad repute in which the whole order was held, among the Jews truly, but among the Romans also.

Cicero, describing the difference between a liberal and a sordid occupation, picks out first of all as the most illiberal of all occupations, those of the under-publican and of the usurer. But Cicero had been governor of a province, and had been the master and not the servant of these men. The poor provincial who had felt their greed and rapacity, and had been hailed before the magistrate, and fleeced by their false accusations, would add to Cicero's disdain, a bitter feeling of hatred and wrong. While if that provincial were a Jew, of the seed of Abraham, and priding himself that he was never in bondage to any man, and the under-publican were also a Jew, who had openly joined the Roman power in levying upon his fellow-countrymen these imposts, which were in themselves a badge of servitude,-judge if

national pride and religious feeling would not doubly embitter the hatred with which the Jews at large regarded this obnoxious class.

No wonder then that "publicans and sinners," "publicans and harlots," "an heathen man and a publican," are classed together in contemptuous scorn; such a scorn, that a pharisee in the Temple even could not believe a good thing of his fellow-worshipper, if he happened to be a publican.

I hope, brethren, you have never belonged,-and may God help you if you ever do belong to a class, or an occupation that is looked down upon, discredited, or suspected by very many of those among whom you dwell. I thank God I was not born a Roman Catholic in our Protestant England; not only because I believe ours to be the truer way of worshipping God, but also because the inveterate prejudice with which the bulk of Englishmen regard that cult, makes it difficult, I should opine, for an English Roman Catholic to be natural and unexaggerated in his religion, but forces him always to be in an attitude of defence, of isolation, of self-assertion. And the same may be said of several secular callings amongst us. I am afraid the way in which some Temperance advocates talk of their fellow-countrymen who are engaged in the Liquor Traffic, is at once unjust and uncharitable, and unhappily acts with deteriorating effect upon those who are so engaged. To hear one's daily occupation. branded as vile, as soul-destroying, as a work of the devil; to have all the faults, and blunders, and sins of each man in the trade attributed to you personally; to be scorned and ridiculed in speeches on the platform, and prayed for