ness, not an order but a perversion. And so Christ sets himself as the deliverer from each, the origin and the result, the sin at the root, and the misery which is its fruitage. Therefore let no man think that there is any gospel of deliverance or helpfulness for him, except as it is grounded in a cure of whatever evil there may be in him,- evil habits, or selfish aims, or a worldly spirit.

2. The philosophy of this preaching, for I know not how else to name a certain feature of it.

Suppose some questioner had arisen in that synagogue of Nazareth and asked Jesus, not as to the substance of his preaching, for that was plain enough, but what was the ground of it. "You declare a gospel of deliverance; on what ultimate fact or reason do you rest your declaration?" A reasonable question, had there been any to ask it; there are many asking it to-day. I think the answer would have been of this sort: "I am making in this gospel a revelation of God, showing you his very heart, putting Him before you as He is, without any paraphernalia of symbol or ritual, translating Him into life. This is what God feels for you, this is how He loves and pities you, this is what God proposes to do for you; to cheer you with good news, and open your blind eyes, and free your bruised souls and bodies from the captivity of evil." And it is God who is to do this, not any human one, no trend of society or course of nature, no self-struggles or self-wrought wisdom, but God uncovered, revealed, brought abreast human life, and face to

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face with every man; this puts reason into the good words.

When shall we learn it, we of to-day? Troubles enough we all have; cheerless hearts all around us; blind eyes that see no glory in heaven and no path on earth; captives of lust and appetite and avarice and hard-heartedness and sordidness, conscious of the bitter captivity. They are all about us; they are here; perchance we are such; perchance I am! Do we know how to be healed? Do we know how to get free from these blinding, enslaving, tormenting sins? There is but one way, and that is by somehow getting sight of God, such sight of Him that we shall believe in, that is, trust and obey Him? Those words in the Nazareth synagogue were but the idlest breath except as they brought the delivering God before men. But when God is seen and known, the whole nature of man leaps into joyful and harmonious activity. Of all words used by those about to die, the commonest are these: "He is such a God as I want;" profoundest words of faith and philosophy! The only words in death, the best in life! It is God that we want! It is such a God and so revealed that we need! Under this revelation of Him our troubles shrink, our broken hearts are healed, our darkened minds are illuminated, our sins pass away in tears of shame and repentance, and our whole being springs up to meet Him who made us and made us for Himself; the secret of existence is revealed, the end of destiny is achieved!

3. The remaining point is the power of this

preaching. In one sense its power lay in its substance, and in another sense, in the philosophy or ground of it, but there was more than came from these; there was the power that resided in Him who spoke these truths.

There is almost no power in words however comfortable in sound, or explicit in meaning; there is almost as little in bare truth. These are not the lacks of the world. Words! have not men spoken good words from the beginning? Truth! There has been no dearth of truth from the first. It is

written in the heart of man. It cries perpetually in the street. It is graven on the heavens and the earth; philosophy has always taught it; literature is crammed with it. There has never been a civilization nor an age that was not overarched by a knowledge of the fundamental truths of character and duty, never an age without some nearly adequate conception of God. But how powerless! How slowly has the world responded to what it knows! How feebly does any man answer to his perceptions of right and truth! The reason is that truth has little power until it is transmuted into conviction in the mind of some person who utters it as conviction. In no other way has truth any force than by this alchemy of personal belief. There must first be a sight of it, and then a belief in it. There is, however, a wide difference or rather gap, between the two. The philosophers and religionists of old saw truth, but they saw it in detached forms and not as a system; they also failed to connect it with a personal, divine source, and hence

had no ground of inspiration and no sufficient motive to duty. In other phrase, they were without the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Compare, for example, Abraham and Zeno; the latter had an immeasurably wider culture and range of thought, but he could not elaborate a vital system. Abraham, on the contrary, with his one idea of a spiritual, personal God, and his one principle of obedient trust, inaugurated an order that instantly became vital and endures still as eternal truth. He did not look as widely, perhaps not as directly at life, as the Stoic, but he looked in truer directions. One truth, unless it happens to be an all-embracing truth, and no number of truths however clearly seen, have any inspiring or redeeming power until they are grounded in an eternal Person. Mozley, in one of his sermons, asks: "Have we not, in our moral nature, a great deal to do with fragments?" Yes, and it is the weakness of human nature when it undertakes to teach moral truth that it has only fragments to deal with. It is because Christ did not see truth in a fragmentary way, and because there was in Himself nothing fragmentary, that He teaches with power. There is no capability in man of resisting perfect truth; when it is seen, it conquers. The main thing therefore is to see, but men love darkness, and even when they begin to see, it is in a half-blind way.

We read that they wondered at his gracious words, and that later, at Capernaum, they were astonished at his teaching, for his word was with authority or power. Why astonished at his teaching? It

was nothing new; it was mainly a quotation, but He spake it with power, or in a way that commanded assent. But in what lay the commanding power? Not in any impressiveness of manner, or felicity of presentation. It was something more even than sincerity and earnestness of conviction. None of these elements reach up to power. The impressive and felicitous manner is often weak. One may be very sincere and earnest and yet produce no great effect. Elements of power, they do not constitute power. The world is full of sincere and earnest men, advocating measures, pleading for causes, preaching sermons, who make little impression and gain no ends. The main reason is that they lack scope, their vision is small, they do not see their subject in its large relations and bearings. They have no measure or comprehension of it, but take some feature or incident of it and mistake it for the whole. The listeners feel consciously or unconsciously the lack or the error, and refuse to believe, or to be moved. There can be no estimate of the mischief often wrought by very good and earnest men, who by some fine qualities of zeal and honest purpose and fluency, get the attention of the multitude and preach a gospel shot through with narrowness and ignorance, tagging to its fundamental and unmistakable features some de-spiritualizing and cramping notion of a second personal coming of the Lord, or the like, and so dragging the whole system down to the level of a dead Judaism, opening breaches through which the whole faith of the people who first hear them gladly, at last flows out;