end of all things. But the faith in Christ's love, the faith in Christ's holiness, the faith in Christ's authority, the faith in Christ's mercy, has a power to unite good men, to attract all men, to disarm bad men, to encourage weak men, to soften hard men, to convince doubting men, beyond any other faith that has ever yet appeared. What moral exhortations fail to effect from their weakness, what appeals to the feelings fail to effect from their hollowness, what abstract speculations fail to effect from their difficulty, that we may humbly hope to gain from the union of all in the belief in the Living Person of Christ. "Ye believe in God;" ye believe that He makes the sun rise and set, that the seasons will go round in their courses, that harvests will spring up, that winter will go and summer will return. "Ye believe in God,"-"Believe also in Christ." Believe, and show by your lives how you believe, that only by being like to Him. are you brought near to God. Apprehend, appropriate "put on"-"the mind," the actual, original, undoubted mind, "that was in Christ Jesus." Believe, trust in Him, as the Friend and Saviour of sinners, who, out of the deepest distress, can give "all joy and peace in believing," because He calls us to communion and peace with God through Himself; because He can save with that only salvation which the Scriptures ascribe to Him, from sin, from the world, from ourselves. [To have continued these Discourses into the detailed examples of the Evangelical teaching, would have been inconsistent with their introductory and general character. But one such example, it was thought, would not be out of place; - especially in illustration of what has been already said in Sermons II. and IV. For these reasons I have inserted the following Sermon, preached, as will be seen, on another occasion to a different congregation.] SERMON VIII. THE WISDOM OF CHRIST. (PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, ON THE MATT. XXII. 20-22. He saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Cæsar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. THESE words contain a peculiarly characteristic example of our Saviour's mode of teaching, and a profound evangelical principle, applicable to all religious study and instruction. I. He is at Jerusalem, He is in the temple. Thither the best and the worst of the nation were gathered together. All the sects, leaders and followers, were there, bent on their several ends. All the people were there, filled with the one impulse which swayed every Jewish heart at the time of the great festival of the Passover. In the midst of them stood One, who was amongst them but not of them; with His own end clear before Him, an end for which He came to bear witness, and for which He was born into the world, but an end which soared above the highest imagination of those who were gathered around Him and were seeking to make Him their own. He is to cross their path shortly in a still higher path, and to a still higher end. But now He crosses them in turn, one by one, as a Teacher, and the first and most striking example is that contained in the text. Two of the great sections of the Jewish church and nation approach. They are the Pharisees and Herodians. They have contended for years on one, as it seemed to them, all important question: "Was it the duty of the chosen people to submit to the Roman yoke, or to resist? were they to pay tribute to Cæsar or not?" Everything presented itself to them through that medium. To determine the question on the one side or the other was the great need, which they both sought to supply. There was no escape, as they supposed, from one or other of the two horns of this dilemma; on one or other their victim must be transfixed; on one or other they must receive satisfaction. It was exactly in this very confidence that they were both disappointed. What they had said with a dim perception of the character which they only partially understood, was the very rock and corner stone on which they stumbled and were crushed. "The Master" whom they approached "was" indeed "true, and taught the way of God in truth; neither did He care for any man, for He regarded not the person of men." He, the great questioner of mankind, the true discoverer of hearts, burst through this haze of self-illusion, by the same methods (humanly speaking) as that ancient catechiser, the father of human philosophy, had done before Him in the market-place of Athens. He met them with a searching question and with a homely fact: "Why tempt ye me, ye Hypocrites? Show |