Bible Commentaries
Matthew 16

Verse 18

My Church

And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.— Matthew 16:18.

Christ had come very nearly to the close of His Galilean ministry. He had been preaching for about a year, and the twelve disciples had been accompanying Him, listening to His preaching, doing a little preaching themselves, and gradually learning the truth which He had come to proclaim. He had taken them apart by themselves for more close individual religious instruction. He pursued the Socratic method. He asked them to what conclusions they had come as the result of what they had seen and heard during this year’s companionship with Him. He asked, “Who do men say that I am?” And the Apostles reported various answers: “Some say John the Baptist; some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” Then He said unto them, “But who say ye that I am?” And Peter, who was never slow to speak, answered, perhaps as spokesman for the rest, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” To this Christ replied: “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

The whole passage from which these words are taken has been a battlefield for centuries between two irreconcilable conceptions of Christianity. Our Lord had put a question to His disciples, and it was no mere casual inquiry suggested by some chance turn in the conversation. It was really an investigation into the foundation of that world-wide kingdom He had come to establish.

I

The Rock Foundation of the Church

“Thou art Peter (Petros), and on this rock (petra) I will build my church.”

1. The name of Peter is not bestowed here but interpreted. Christ does not say, “Thou shalt be,” but “Thou art”: and so presupposes the former conferring of the name. Unquestionably, the Apostle is the rock on which the Church is built. The efforts to avoid that conclusion would never have been heard of, but for the Roman Catholic controversy; but they are as unnecessary as unsuccessful. Is it credible that in the course of an address which is wholly occupied with conferring prerogatives on the Apostle a clause should come in which is concerned about an altogether different subject from the “thou” of the preceding and the “thee” of the following clauses, and which yet should take the very name of the Apostle, slightly modified, for that other subject? We do not interpret other books in that fashion. But it was not the “flesh and blood” Peter, but Peter as the recipient and faithful utterer of the Divine inspiration in his confession, who received these privileges. Therefore they are not his exclusive property, but belong to his faith, which grasped and confessed the Divine-human Lord; and wherever that faith is, there are these gifts, which are its results. They are the “natural” consequences of the true faith in Christ in that higher region where the supernatural is the natural. Peter’s grasp of Christ’s nature wrought upon his character, as pressure does upon sand, and solidified his shifting impetuosity into rocklike firmness. So the same faith will tend to do in any man. It made him the chief instrument in the establishment of the Early Church. On souls steadied and made solid by like faith, and only on such, can Christ build His Church.

What Christ says, then, is not, “On you and your successors in ecclesiastical office I will build My Church”; not, “On what you have said I will build My Church”; but, “On you as a man transformed by the power of an indwelling Christ, on you as the type of a long line of humanity growing broader through the sweep and range of history, humanity transformed and changed by the indwelling of My own Messianic life, I will build My Church.” This is the interpretation of the text afforded by its setting. This is also Peter’s own interpretation. “Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and evil speakings, as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.”

The change of person “on this rock,” instead of “upon thee,” is the natural result of the sudden transition from a direct to a metaphorical address; and is in exact accordance with our Lord’s manner on other occasions. He said not “Destroy Me” or “the temple of My body,” but “destroy this temple” ( John 2:19). The change of gender from Petros to petra is the natural result of the change from a proper name to the work from which the proper name is derived. The French language alone, of all those into which the original has been translated, has been able entirely to preserve their identity. The Greek Petros, which for the sake of the masculine termination was necessarily used to express the name itself, was yet so rarely used in any other sense than a “ stone” that the exigency of the language required an immediate return to the word petra, which, as in Greek generally, so also in the New Testament, is the almost invariable appellation of a “ rock.” To speak of any confession or form of words, however sacred, as a foundation or rock, would be completely at variance with the living representation of the New Testament. It is not any doctrine concerning Christ, but Christ Himself, that is spoken of as being in the highest and strictest sense the foundation of the Church ( 1 Corinthians 3:11), and so whenever the same figure is used to express the lower and earthly instruments of the establishment of God’s Kingdom, it is not any teaching or system that is meant, but living human persons. Thus the Apostles are all of them called “foundations” of the Church in Ephesians 2:20; Revelation 21:14; and, by a nearly similar metaphor, Peter, James, and John are called “pillars” ( Galatians 2:9), the faithful Christian a “pillar in the temple of God” ( Revelation 3:12), and Timotheus, by a union of both metaphors, “the pillar and ground” of the “truth in the house of God.” 1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, 113.]

Stier is suggestive upon this point: “The man is Simon Bar-jona the sinner: not upon him, therefore, is it to be built; but upon this Peter such as grace makes him; upon him because, and in as far as, he certainly corresponds to this name more than the others. Still for this very reason the co-ordinate stones and pillars are by no means excluded, and even the primacy of Peter rests at bottom only upon this, that he is called to begin the preaching of the Word as first among equals.” So wonderfully does the Lord vouchsafe to build up the eternal fabric of the Church out of human stones, Himself indeed the chief corner-stone, and the twelve Apostles the twelve foundations, St. Peter the great basal stone of the fabric, while thereon is built up, as that very St. Peter himself testifies, out of living stones, a spiritual house. 1 [Note: A. Ritchie, Spiritual Studies in St. Matthew’s Gospel, ii. 33.]

2. Jesus builds His Church upon average human nature. Who was this man of whom Jesus said that he was a rock? He was the most unstable and shifting of the disciples, as little like a rock as a man could be. Jesus must have known this; Peter must have known it; and the fishermen with Peter must have known it also. He was quick to act and quick to reject. He was what the modern world calls a “quitter,” a man who could not stand the strain of disapproval or suspicion; a man who was more like sand than rock. Yet Jesus takes him just as he is, believes in him when he does not believe in himself, sees his underlying qualities of strength and leadership, and converts him into the rock which He would have him be. It was like the process of nature which tosses the sand up on the shore and then beats upon it and hardens it until it becomes converted into stone; and we call it, by what seems a contradiction in terms, sandstone. So Jesus takes this unstable character and says to it: “Thou shalt be a rock,” and by the hard friction and compression of experience Peter becomes that which Jesus saw that he could be.

Mr. Bernard Shaw (who asks not for a new kind of philosophy but for a new kind of man) cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link. 1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, 66.]

We are all familiar with the expression “a chip of the old block.” The quality of the chip bespeaks a block of like quality. The chip is a pattern or sample of the block. In the same way the evidently durable petra calls up the image of a petros of like quality, as that which would afford an unrivalled foundation upon which to build. Thus when our Lord to His first utterance, “I also say unto thee, that thou art Petros,” adds the words, “and upon this petra I will build my church,” it is like the farmer taking up the sample, and declaring, “With this corn will I sow my field,” or the woman viewing the pattern, and saying, “Of this stuff will I have a dress.” 2 [Note: F. G. Cholmondeley, in The Expositor, 2nd Ser., viii. 76.]

3. Although the metaphor here regards Jesus, not as the foundation, but as the Founder of the Church, yet in a real sense He is the Church’s “one foundation,” and Scripture generally speaks of Him as such. If you would seek a sufficient foundation for the Church, it can be found only in One who can give support and maintenance to all that the Church is; only in One who can uphold from the first and through the ages all that enters into the parts and thought and activities of the Church; only in One who Himself contains within Himself the substance which, when worked out by the power of living spirit, will become the manifold forms of the Church’s contents—her faith, her sacraments, her worship, her activities, her many kinds and forms of grace and goodness. And He only is such a One who said “Upon this rock I will build my church.” And so St. Paul says, “Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

Our Lord proclaimed Himself the Founder of a world-wide and imperishable Society. He did not propose to act powerfully upon the convictions and the characters of individual men, and then to leave to them, when they believed and felt alike, the liberty of voluntarily forming themselves into an association, with a view to reciprocal sympathy and united action. From the first, the formation of a society was not less an essential feature of Christ’s plan than was His redemptive action upon single souls. The society was not to be a school of thinkers, nor a self-associated company of enterprising fellow-workers; it was to be a Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, or, as it is also called, the Kingdom of God. 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon, The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 101.]

II

The Structure Built upon the Rock

“I will build my church.”

1. The word “church” was neither new nor doubtful in meaning to Jesus’ disciples. It was the rendering they found in that Greek Bible they had in their hands for one of the most sacred and significant terms of the Old Testament. The Greek word ecclesia is the translation of the Hebrew expression for “the congregation of the Lord.” Peter and his fellow-disciples could not fail to realize that Jesus was forming the little band who had companied with Him into a definite and organized religious community. They were no longer a company of men who formed the school of a Master. They were the church, the society, the congregation of Christ. That society was seen in those twelve men who looked up with wondering eyes and flushed faces to Him whom they had confessed. It was seen again in the Upper Room at the supper table. It was seen again in Jerusalem as, together with the women, they waited on God in prayer, and the number of the names was about an hundred and twenty. It was seen again when the believers met in the first Council at Jerusalem, and the apostles and elders came together to consider. It was seen also whenever men and women met for prayer and for service to Christ.

Ruskin has pointed out how the New Testament use of the word “church” emphasizes this simple and unecclesiastical meaning of the term. It can be seen to-day where two or three are gathered together in His name. To be gathered together in His name means for some purpose He has ordained which can be fulfilled through His Spirit, under a sense of His presence. “ Ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia.” Where Christ is, there is the Church. It is the organ through which the great truths He preached, those of God, of the meaning and worth of His words and life and passion and redemption, are declared. It is the witness to His resurrection, the evangelist of His message, the pillar and ground of His truth, the fold of His flock. Like every other society it must have its officers and its ceremonies. Like every other society it must have its functions and its services. These have been simply and fully described as “the word, sacraments, and prayer.” Whatever more men shall plead they may and should add to the form and fashion of the Church of Christ nothing more than this was understood by the men of Christ’s own time. 1 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 46.]

2. The Church, or assembly of God’s people, is represented as a house; not a temple so much as a beleaguered fortress, according to the figure frequently used by the prophets immediately before the Captivity, and naturally suggested by the actual position of the palace and Temple of Jerusalem on their impregnable hills. But this assembly or congregation, which up to this time had been understood only of the Jewish people, is here described as being built afresh; “built,” according to the significant meaning of that word, which, both in the Old and in the New Testament, always involves the idea of progress, creation, expansion, by Him who here, as so often elsewhere, appropriates to Himself what had up to that time been regarded as the incommunicable attribute of the Lord of Hosts. It is of this fortress, this “spiritual house,” to use the phrase in his own Epistle ( 1 Peter 2:5), that Peter is to be the foundation-rock. It was no longer to be reared on the literal rock of Zion, but on a living man, and that man not the high priest of Jerusalem but a despised fisherman of Galilee. He who had stepped forward with his great confession in this crisis had shown that he was indeed well fitted to become the stay and support of a congregation no less holy than that which had been with Moses in the wilderness, or with Solomon in the Temple.

We are to be careful as to where we build, and with what we build. The Eddystone Lighthouse was once demolished because it did not properly rest on the rock; and if we are not built on Christ—His doctrine, merit, fellowship, promise—we must be confounded. Let me be sure that I am morticed into the impregnable Rock! Careful with what we build! Eddystone Lighthouse perished once because it was built of wrong material—constructed of wood, it was burnt. How much often enters into the Christian creed that is not jewel or gold—fancies, speculations, notions, utterly worthless! How much often enters into the Christian life that is superficial, freakish, trivial, inferior, and inharmonious! Strange combinations of the true and the false, the precious and the paltry, the beautiful and the vulgar, the essential and the absurd! Lord, grant me grace to build on the granite—to build on Thee. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

3. Christ describes the Church lovingly as “My church.” If we read the Gospels carefully we shall see with what strictness of application our Lord used the word “My.” He never said, “My house,” “My lands,” “My books,” “My wife,” “My child.” He said, “My Father,” “My friends,” “My disciples.” When we think of it we shall see that His true possessions were His Father and His Church—“My Father,” “My Church.”

The Church is the company, now indeed quite innumerable, of disciple-like souls who are for ever and ever learning of Him, some of them, the greater number, beholding His face, and serving Him day and night in His temple; the rest not seeing Him yet, but rejoicing in Him with joy unspeakable and full of glory. In a word, the Church is the faithful souls of every place and name known and unknown to whom His name is unutterably dear and His words are more precious than fine gold, who love Him with a love that is more than human, who trust Him with a trust that is stronger than life or death, whose eager desire is to obey Him and serve Him, and whose fervent prayer for ever and ever is to get His truth made known, His salvation proved, and His name lifted above every name, until at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. Upon all these, wherever they are, the Saviour looks down as with the joy of one who looks upon a noble possession, and He says, “They are My Church; and there is no other.”

It is not our Church; it is Christ’s Church, first and last and always. We cannot do in it what we please: we must do what Christ pleases. He is its Builder. We may use the term “Builder” of Him very much as we use it of an architect to-day. Jesus Christ is the Architect of the Christian Church, and we are all builders under Him—masons, carpenters, hodmen—and the business of these people, from the foreman of the works right downward, is to carry out the Architect’s plan. 1 [Note: W. B. Selbie, in The British Congregationalist, March 23, 1911.]

A foundation must be hidden and out of sight unto all those that outwardly look upon the house. They cannot perceive it, though every part of the house doth rest upon it. And this hath occasioned many mistakes in the world. An unwise man coming to a great house, seeing the antics [wall decorations] and pictures [figures? pillars?] stand crouching under the windows and sides of the house, may haply think that they bear up the weight of the house, when indeed they are for the most part pargeted [painted] posts. They bear not the house: the house bears them. By their bowing and outward appearance, the man thinks the burden is on them, and supposes it would be an easy thing, at any time, by taking them away, to demolish the house itself. But when he sets himself to work, he finds these things of no value. There is a foundation in the bottom, which bears up the whole, that he thought not of. Men looking upon the Church do find that it is a fair fabric indeed, but cannot imagine how it should stand. A few supporters it seemeth to have in the world, like crouching antics [wall decorations] under the windows, that make some show of under-propping it; here you have a magistrate, there an army or so. Think the men of the world, “Can we but remove these people, the whole would quickly topple to the ground.” Yea, so foolish have I been myself, and so void of understanding before the Lord, as to take a view of some goodly appearing props of this building and to think, How shall the house be preserved if these be removed—when lo! suddenly some have been manifested to be held up by the house, and not to hold it up. I say then, Christ, as the foundation of this house, is hidden to the men of this world; they see it not, they believe it not. There is nothing more remote from their apprehension than that Christ should be at the bottom of them and their ways, whom they so much despise. 2 [Note: John Owen.]

III

The Security of the Structure

“The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

1. The figure of the gates is one of the oldest and most familiar in Eastern life. At the gate of every city its elders sat in judg ment and in council, as Lot sat in the gates of Sodom. From the gates of the city there issued forth its armies of conquest. “The gates of Hades” is a picturesque and Oriental metaphor for the counsel and craft and force of evil. By the figure Jesus conjured up to the imagination of His disciples that underworld of spiritual evil from which there issued forth the powers of darkness. From these gates of hell Jesus saw down the centuries of the history of His Church, in which all the wisdom of this world, its cunning and cruelty and foul passion, would assail His society of believing men. He foresaw the long struggle when

Zion in her anguish

With Babylon must cope.

He foresaw those eras when the battle would seem to go against His Church. He saw His disciples before the Council. He saw His martyr saints witnessing with their lives when paganism sprung on them like a savage beast roused from its lair. He saw the subtler powers of darkness sapping the faith, corrupting the purities, and leavening the simplicities, of His people’s worship, and service. He saw the enemy sowing his tares among the wheat. But He saw His Church, in the power of its moral and spiritual energy, emerging from every conflict with a greater victory. He saw of the travail of His soul and was satisfied.

2. History has justified this promise. The gates of Hades have not prevailed. The Christian Church, on whose foundation in Himself He began to build with, as it were, but a single stone in His hand, has, beyond all other positive institutions, defied and surmounted destruction. Great changes have taken place since Jesus ventured the promise of this portion of Scripture to a poor fisherman, and threw into the air that challenge against fate. Numerous old customs have decayed. Whole systems of religion and philosophy have passed away. Famous cities have crumbled in the dust, and wild beasts have roamed, and birds of prey have screamed over their ruins. Races of men have been dispersed, or are even now in their last remnants thinly melting into the grave which this earth has for nations as well as for individuals. Yea, the very shores of the seas have begun to shift their places, and the everlasting hills have bowed their heads since Jesus spoke to Peter. But the gates of hell have not prevailed against His Church. Not only has it survived unhurt, as the promise implies, but it has flourished and increased; and under its various names, and with open doors, it still invites the sons of men at once to the shelter of its walls and through the opening of its aisles into paths of endless advancement.

In the middle of the last century all literary and philosophical people in this country were writing down the Church, saying its last days were come: when bishops like Butler were apologizing for Christianity, and historians like David Hume were predicting that by the end of the century it would be among the dead religions; it was just at that time that the great Evangelical revival of Wesley and Whitefield commenced, which carried a new wave, or rather a new fire, of religious fervour into every corner of the land. Again, towards the close of the century, when the French Encyclopædists, led by Voltaire, were saying that Jesus the Nazarene had at last been blotted out, and that Christian temples would be changed into halls of science—it was at that time that William Carey went out to India, and the great foreign missionary enterprise was renewed, if not commenced, which has carried the sign of the cross, and the light of it, into the darkest parts of the world. And the Church has always been surprising its enemies in that way by its wonderful resurrections, just as Jewish rulers were surprised when they found that the name of Jesus which they had crucified, and buried, and got rid of, was working greater miracles than ever. 1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, The Cross in Modern Life, 116.]

We understand ourselves to be risking no new assertion, but simply reporting what is already the conviction of the greatest of our age, when we say,—that cheerfully recognizing, gratefully appropriating whatever Voltaire has proved, or any other man has proved, or shall prove, the Christian Religion, once here, cannot again pass away; that in one or the other form, it will endure through all time; that as in Scripture, so also in the heart of man, is written, “the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” Were the memory of this Faith never so obscured, as, indeed, in all times, the coarse passions and perceptions of the world do all but obliterate it in the hearts of most: yet in every pure soul, in every Poet and Wise Man, it finds a new Missionary, a new Martyr, till the great volume of Universal History is finally closed, and man’s destinies are fulfilled in this earth. 2 [Note: Carlyle, Miscellanies, ii. 173 (Essay on Voltaire).]

3. The greatest hindrance to the victory of this society of Christ, and the supreme sorrow of all loyal hearts within it, has been the low standard of its Christian character, and the apostasy of those traitor hearts who have sometimes found a place among its leaders. The root of this low level of life, and the source of this treachery, has always been the failure to maintain the test of a personal experience. Wherever Christian teachers sanction membership on the ground of a proper age, a sufficient knowledge, a Christian training, or a due regard for religious observances, unworthy lives and heedless practices abound. So long as the winnowing fan of persecution blew away the chaff there was little but wheat in the garner of God and the society of Christ. When the cleansing fires of a searching poverty, a costly service, and an open outcastness, purged believers’ hearts of pride and ambition, Christ’s society was the ideal of a godly chivalry. But when the Church grew rich and powerful, and when title and rank became appanages of its leaders, and office in it became a coveted distinction, then this solemn test of a personal touch with God was evaded. Christ’s society was no longer a community and brotherhood of pure and lowly men. Whatever rank, or place, or authority any man has held in any church in Christendom, it is a simple certainty that Christ has not welcomed him in at all, if he has had no revelation from God.

Thoreau spoke of men whose pretence to be Christian was ridiculous, for they had no genius for it. Matthew Arnold said of John Wesley that he had “a genius for godliness.” But nothing can be more misleading than to use such terms as these. They are a distinct denial of Christ’s great truth that God’s revelation of grace is made not to the wise and prudent, but to babes. There have been men of a real genius for morality, but there is no such thing as a genius for religion. The most reckless and godless wretch, whose name has been a synonym for coarse and blatant atheism, about whom Thoreau and Matthew Arnold would say that he had a genius for devilry, has become a splendid and glorious saint. Wherever there is a soul there is a genius for godliness. But that soul must have come nakedly and openly under the power of God. Then and not till then does it pass into Christ’s society. 1 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 49.]

If Augustin guessed from this upheaval of his whole frame how close at hand was the heavenly visitation, all he felt at the moment was a great need to weep, and he wanted solitude to weep freely. He went down into the garden. Alypius, feeling uneasy, followed at a distance, and in silence sat down beside him on the bench where he had paused. Augustin did not even notice that his friend was there. His agony of spirit began again. All his faults, all his old stains came once more to his mind, and he grew furious against his cowardly feebleness as he felt how much he still clung to them. Oh, to tear himself free from all these miseries—to finish with them once for all!… Suddenly he sprang up. It was as if a gust of the tempest had struck him. He rushed to the end of the garden, flung himself on his knees under a fig-tree, and with his forehead pressed against the earth he burst into tears. Even as the olive-tree at Jerusalem which sheltered the last watch of the Divine Master, the fig-tree of Milan saw fall upon its roots a sweat of blood. Augustin, breathless in the victorious embrace of Grace, panted: “How long, how long? To-morrow and to-morrow? Why not now? Why not this hour make an end of my vileness?”

Now, at this very moment a child’s voice from the neighbouring house began repeating in a kind of chant: “Take and read, take and read.” Augustin shuddered. What was this refrain? Was it a nursery-rhyme that the little children of the countryside used to sing? He could not recollect it; he had never heard it before. Immediately, as upon a Divine command, he rose to his feet and ran back to the place where Alypius was sitting, for he had left St. Paul’s Epistles lying there. He opened the book, and the passage on which his eyes first fell was this: “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.” The flesh! The sacred text aimed at him directly—at him, Augustin, still so full of lust! This command was the answer from on high.

He put his finger between the leaves, closed the volume. His frenzy had passed away. A great peace was shed upon him—it was all over. With a calm face he told Alypius what had happened, and without lingering he went into his mother’s room to tell her also. Monnica was not surprised. It was long now since she had been told, “Where I am, there shalt thou be also.” But she gave way to an outburst of joy. Her mission was done. Now she might sing her canticle of thanksgiving and enter into God’s peace. 1 [Note: Louis Bertrand, Saint Augustin (trans. by V. O’Sullivan), 206.]

My Church

Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 157.

Adeney (W. F.), in Men of the New Testament, 109.

Book (W. H.), The Columbus Tabernacle Sermons, 142.

Brown (C. R.), The Young Man’s Affairs, 139.

Burrell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 296.

Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 42.

Dewhurst (F. E.), The Investment of Truth, 191.

Goulburn (E. M.), The Holy Catholic Church, 1.

Gray (W. H.), Old Creeds and New Beliefs, 232.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Cross in Modern Life, 105.

Holland (H. S.), Creed and Character, 37.

Horton (R. F.), The Teaching of Jesus, 125.

Jones (J. C.), Studies in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, 255.

Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 109.

Newman (J. H.), Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 263.

Nicoll (W. R.), The Lamp of Sacrifice, 113.

Owen (J. W.), Some Australian Sermons, 167.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 33.

Sanderson (T.), Unfulfilled Designs, 141.

Shepherd (A.), Bible Studies in Living Subjects, 219.

Stanley (A. P.), Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, 76.

British Congregationalist, March 23, 1911 (W. B. Selbie); Sept. 21, 1911 (J. Warschauer).

Christian World Pulpit, xxxiv. 207 (C. Garrett); lviii. 243 (J. A. Brinkworth).

Churchman’s Pulpit: St. Peter, St. James, xv. 36 (C. Hardwick).

Contemporary Review, xcvii. (1910) 165 (G. Whitelock).

Expositor, 2nd Ser., vii. 311 (J. A. Beet).

Homiletic Review, New Ser., xliv. 239 (F. R. Hiel).

Verse 19

The Keys of the Kingdom

I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.— Matthew 16:19.

When this promise was given the little Galilean company was standing on one of the lower spurs of the Lebanon, amidst the pleasant rush and music of its countless brooks, with the grey walls of the Roman castle at Cæsarea Philippi in the distance. Peter had just made his great confession, and by his swift and far-reaching intuition had established his place as foremost man of the Twelve. It was under these circumstances that this peculiar form of expression was first used by our Lord. After speaking of the supernatural knowledge that Peter had received from the Father, Christ goes on to announce the important relation of Peter, as the first possessor and witness of such knowledge, to the Church of the future. And then He advances a step, and speaks of a future gift of light and power and dominion to Peter which the Apostle should receive from His hand: “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

I

The Keys

“I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

Keys are the emblems of authority, and this language was addressed to Peter because of the power that was to be conferred on him. He was to arrange and toil, determine and order, in the affairs of Christ’s Kingdom, not, of course, absolutely, but under Christ, for Christ is the Head. Peter’s authority was to be real, but none the less derived from and dependent upon Christ’s will. Now, as Peter’s power was not to be absolute, so it was not to be solitary. It was to be shared by the other Apostles. That is not brought out in the text, for here Christ is dealing only with His servant who had so grandly confessed Him. But later on Christ conferred on the entire company of the disciples the same wonderful power and privilege as He had conferred on Peter, when He said, not to any Apostle in particular but to the entire Church, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” One outcome of the authority was that Peter, like the others, could bind and unloose, could forbid or enjoin, what should be done in the Kingdom of Christ. Through the Apostle Christ was to express His will. Through him the Master was to carry on and carry out His purposes. What Peter ordered would be what Christ desired. What Peter forbade would be the things Christ disapproved, and herein was the reality of the power, herein the vastness of the privilege, that Christ was to work in and through him, for that is loftier and grander than for any man to devise and determine unaided and unguided of the Spirit of God. And it is in virtue of this real and true guiding Spirit that we have the Epistles of Paul, and Peter, and John, and others developing the doctrine of the cross of Christ, and setting forth the source of and the power of the Christian life.

1. If we refer to another occasion upon which Christ used this metaphor of the keys, we shall find that Christ was accustomed to associate with the expression knowledge and the specific power that comes from knowledge. To the lawyers He said, “Ye took away the key of knowledge.” The reference here can only be to the knowledge that unlocks the gates leading into the Kingdom of Heaven. That was Christ’s future gift to Peter. Putting this side by side with the fact that Christ has just been speaking of a knowledge of His own person and character that had been given to Peter, what can the knowledge that Christ would by and by give be but the knowledge of the Father, of which He was the one only spring and channel amongst men? It was through that knowledge that Peter was to open the way for men into the Kingdom of Heaven. “To bind” and “to loose” was to teach and to rule in the Kingdom of Heaven, in harmony with the knowledge received from the Father. We observe that the promise deals more immediately with things, not persons; with truths and duties, not with human souls. The Apostles dealt with souls as all other disciples of Christ deal with them, intermediately, through the truths and precepts on which the salvation of souls turned. The power of the keys, of binding and loosing, was in reality the power of knowing the essential truths of God’s character and will.

(1) It is the power of a teacher. Among the Jews, when a scribe was admitted to his office a key was given to him as the symbol of the duties which he was expected to perform. He was set apart to study with diligence the Book of the Law, and to read and explain it to the people. Jesus Christ reproved the Rabbis and Pharisees of His day for having taken away the key of knowledge, and for shutting up the Kingdom of Heaven against men, that is, trying to lock good men out. They knew little of the spirit of the law which they taught, and their teaching produced evil fruits in the lives of their countrymen.

There is a sense in which all who faithfully preach the word of the Kingdom hold the keys. When we say that we have got the key to a difficulty, or that an army holds the key to a position, we mean that, however long it may be before the proof of the power is manifested, yet it is there. So with those who proclaim the truth as it is in Jesus. Their word may be derided, their warnings scorned, their entreaties mocked at; yet as the word they speak is not their own but the word of God, so shall that word loose or bind, shut up or set free. But it is the Lord who does this; man is but His agent for declaring His message. Every command or threat is heard by conscience, but the thing that is declared may be long a-coming. It will come, however. So with every word of the gospel: the truth in Jesus is the key of the Kingdom: the decisive proof we may be long in discovering, but early or late every one must find a barred or an abundant entrance, according as he has given heed to or neglected the word of life.

When Luther opened the long-closed Bible in the Gospels and Epistles, he was bringing forth out of his treasury things new and old. He was binding and loosing the consciences of men. When Andrew Melville, in Scottish history, took King James by the sleeve as that pedant was arrogating to himself a spiritual power which was his neither by law nor by grace, and called him “God’s silly vassal,” reminding him that there were two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland, he may have been lacking in courtesy, but he was proving himself a scribe of the Kingdom. When John Brown of Harper’s Ferry stooped to kiss the negro child in its slave mother’s arms as he passed to his death, men of vision might have seen the keys of the Kingdom at his girdle. All men now realize that in his own rude way he taught the things of Christ to his own generation. Wherever and whenever the Christian Church, through its ministers and people and its inspired saints, shall stand to proclaim some high duty or to renounce some hoary wrong, they shall bind and they shall loose, and they shall fulfil the function of the Church in the Kingdom of God. 1 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 65.]

(2) Again, we are reminded that knowledge is necessary to life; we believe and then do. The great principle is taught that the morality of Christianity flows directly from its theology, and that whoever, like Peter, grasps firmly the cardinal truth of Christ’s nature, and all which flows therefrom, will have his insight so cleared that his judgments on what is permitted or forbidden to a Christian man will correspond with the decisions of heaven, in the measure of his hold upon the truth which underlies all religion and all morality, namely, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” These are gifts to Peter indeed, but only as possessor of that faith, and are much more truly understood as belonging to all who “possess like precious faith” (as Peter says) than as the prerogative of any individual or class.

In a chapter of reminiscences which is given at the end of the second volume of the Letters of Erskine of Linlathen, Principal Shairp writes: “Mr. Erskine utterly repudiated the character which Renan’s Vie de Jésus drew of our Lord, and almost resented the fatuity which could separate with a sharp line the morality of the Gospels from their doctrinal teaching as to Christ Himself. He used to say, ‘As you see in many English churches the Apostles’ Creed placed on one side of the altar, on the other the Ten Commandments, so Renan would divide as with a knife the moral precepts of the Gospels from their doctrines. Those he would retain, these he would throw away. Can anything be more blind? As well might you expect the stem and leaves of a flower to flourish when you had cut away the root, as to retain the morality of the Gospels when you have discarded its doctrinal basis. Faith in Christ, and God in Christ, is the only root from which true Christian morality can grow.’ ” 1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, 1840–1870, p. 375.]

2. The history of St. Peter, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, reveals the facts that the lofty promise contained in the text was fulfilled in three important particulars.

(1) He is first in the first election to the vacant apostolate. He is first in the first great conversion of souls. His word rolls like the storm. It cuts and pierces like the sword. We do not require to have the imagination exalted by the vast gilded letters round the cupola of St. Peter’s at Rome. This is truly to hold the keys, and to roll back the doors of the Kingdom!

My mother’s death was the second epoch in my father’s life; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made. He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in tears, himself outwardly unmoved. But from that time dates an entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preaching, because an entire change in his way of dealing with God’s Word. Not that his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even altered—I doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but was “wise unto salvation”—but it strengthened and clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing; he got a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and with a fresh power—with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled, but fuel was heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that τι θερμὸ?ν πρᾶ?γμα , burned with a new ardour; indeed had he not found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendour and combustion or dwindled into lethargy.… From being elegant, rhetorical, and ambitious in his preaching, he became concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself moved), keen, searching, unswerving, authoritative to fierceness, full of the terrors of the Lord, if he could but persuade men. The truth of the words of God had shone out upon him with an immediateness and infinity of meaning and power which made them, though the same words he had looked on from childhood, other and greater and deeper words. He then left the ordinary commentators, and men who write about meanings and flutter around the circumference and corners; he was bent on the centre, on touching with his own fingers, on seeing with his own eyes, the pearl of great price. Then it was that he began to dig into the depths, into the primary and auriferous rock of Scripture, and take nothing at another’s hand: then he took up with the word “apprehend”; he had laid hold of the truth,—there it was, with its evidence, in his hand; and every one who knew him must remember well how, in speaking with earnestness of the meaning of a passage, he, in his ardent, hesitating way, looked into the palm of his hand, as if he actually saw there the truth he was going to utter. 1 [Note: Dr. John Brown, Horœ Subsecivœ, ii. 9.]

(2) But the great promise to Peter is fulfilled in a second way. Spiritual sin would steal into the Church; it would glide in under a haze of profession and pretence, as Milton tells us that Satan passed in mist into Paradise. It is Peter who speaks with such awful power. Simon makes an attempt to buy the gift of God with money, and brands upon his own name for ever its ill-omened connexion with the foul offence (far from obsolete) of buying spiritual offices. Peter’s voice pronounces his condemnation. “All men,” says the Koran, “are commanded by the saint.” All men know, if only by instinct, that this priesthood of goodness has been won at the cross, in blood, the “crimson of which gives a living hue to all form, all history, all life.” Let us no longer lose our purchase of this mighty term, through fear of its sacerdotal connotations. Dissociated from the institution, as it has been well pointed out, the true priest makes good his claims to mediatorship in the heart of his fellows, solely by the possession of those spiritual qualities which create and confirm the impression that he is nearer to God than they.

Francis of Assisi is pre-eminently the saint of the Middle Ages. Owing nothing to church or school, he was truly theodidact, and if he perhaps did not perceive the revolutionary bearing of his preaching, he at least always refused to be ordained priest. He divined the superiority of the spiritual priesthood. The charm of his life is that, thanks to reliable documents, we find the man behind the wonder worker. We find in him not merely noble actions, we find in him a life in the true meaning of the word; I mean, we feel in him both development and struggle. How mistaken are the annals of the Saints in representing him as from the very cradle surrounded with aureole and nimbus! As if the finest and most manly of spectacles were not that of the man who conquers his soul hour after hour, fighting against himself, against the suggestions of egoism, idleness, discouragement, then at the moment when he might believe himself victorious, finding in the champions attracted by his ideal those who are destined if not to bring about its complete ruin, at least to give it its most terrible blows. Poor Francis! The last years of his life were indeed a via dolorosa as painful as that where his Master sank down under the weight of the cross; for it is still a joy to die for one’s ideal, but what bitter pain to look on in advance at the apotheosis of one’s body, while seeing one’s soul—I would say his thought—misunderstood and frustrated. 1 [Note: P. Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, p. xv.]

(3) But there is exhibited yet another fulfilment to the great promise. Peter is also the first to divine the secret of God, to follow the mind of the Spirit. He climbs rapidly to the highest peak, and is the first herald of the dawn. The old is, no doubt, very dear to him; he clings to all that is devout and venerable with the tenacious loyalty of a true Hebrew churchman. He goes up “into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour.” He ascends the house-top “to pray at the sixth hour.” The services of the Temple and of the synagogue go on upon a parallel line with the first eucharists. But this Hebraic Christianity, or Christian Hebraism, cannot continue indefinitely. There are souls among the Gentiles longing for forgiveness, for rest and purity. They are not to dwell in the shadow, to tarry disappointed in the vestibule for ever. It is for Peter to fling back the doors once again. He receives the vision in the house of Simon, the tanner, by the seaside.

Far o’er the glowing western main

His wistful brow was upward raised,

Where, like an angel’s burning train,

The burnished waters blazed.

And now his part as founder and rock is almost over. The reception of Cornelius is his last great act. The last mention of his name in St. Luke’s narrative is in these sentences: “There rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses. And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter. And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up and said unto them”—his last words are characteristic—“But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they.”

II

The Power of the Keys

“Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Although the notion of opening and shutting shades off into that of “binding and loosing,” it is obvious that the less familiar expression would not have been substituted for the more familiar without some specific reason, which reason is in this case supplied by the well-known meaning of the words themselves. The figure of “binding and loosing,” for “allowing as lawful, or forbidding as unlawful,” is so simple and obvious that no language has been wholly without it. Twice besides the expression is used: “Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” ( Matthew 18:18); and “Whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained” ( John 20:23). On these occasions the words are spoken to others besides St. Peter, and on each occasion the sense is substantially the same: “So great shall be the authority of your decisions, that, unlike those of the ordinary schools or Rabbis, whatsoever you shall declare lawful shall be held lawful, whatsoever you shall declare unlawful shall be held unlawful, in the highest tribunal in heaven.”

1. It is, as it were, the solemn inauguration of the right of the Christian’s conscience to judge with a discernment of good and evil, to which up to this time the world had seen no parallel. In that age, when the foundations of all ancient belief were shaken, when acts which up to that time had been regarded as lawful or praiseworthy were now condemned as sinful, or which before had been regarded as sinful were now enjoined as just and holy, it was no slight comfort to have it declared, by the one authority which all Christians acknowledged as Divine, that there were those living on the earth on whose judgment in these disputed matters the Church might rely with implicit confidence. In the highest sense of all, doubtless, this judgment was exercised by Him alone who taught “as one having authority, and not as the scribes,” and who on the Mount of the new law drew the line between His own commandments and what was said by them of old time. In a lower sense it was exercised, and has ever since been exercised, by all those who by their teaching or their lives, by their words or their example, have impressed the world more deeply with a sense of what is Christian holiness and what is Christian liberty. In an intermediate sense, it has been exercised by those whose special gifts or opportunities have made them in a more than ordinary degree the oracles and lawgivers of the moral and spiritual society in which they have been placed. Such, above all, were the Apostles. By their own lives and teaching, by their Divinely sanctioned judgments on individual cases (as St. Paul on Elymas or the incestuous Corinthian) or on general principles (as in their Epistles), they have, in a far higher sense than any other human beings, bound and loosed the consciences, remitted and retained the sins, of the whole human race for ever.

The Jewish scribe kept the treasury of knowledge. His keys were his powers of reading and understanding and applying the law of God. He was the expositor of God’s word, the interpreter of God’s mind, the commentator on God’s counsels, the teacher of the truth made known to him by God. He bound the things of God—His laws, His ideals of life and duty, His lawful sanctions, His sacred and mystic revelation of Himself—upon men’s hearts and consciences. He loosed men’s minds and wills from any bondage, or any tyranny of unrighteous laws, and he enabled them to refrain from indulging in things forbidden. What the Jewish scribe with the keys of knowledge and truth and duty was to the Law, the Christian Church should be to the Kingdom of God. “Every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” That describes both Christ’s own office as the Master and His disciples as His Church.

Go into an observatory, and watch some astronomer as he is following the transit of a star. His telescope is so adjusted that an ingenious arrangement of clock-work is made to shift it with the transit of the star. His instrument is moving in obedience to the movement of the star in the heavens. But the clock-work does not move the star. The astronomer has made his faultless calculations; the mechanic has adjusted his cranks and pendulums and wheels and springs with unerring nicety, and every movement in the telescope answers to the movement of the star in the far-off heavens. The correspondence rests on knowledge. And so when the things that are bound on earth are bound in heaven. Every legislative counsel and decree and movement in a truly apostolic and inspired Church answers to some counsel and decree and movement in the heavens. But then the power of discerning and forecasting the movements of the Divine will and government rests upon the power of interpreting the Divine character and applying its principles of action, as that character is communicated to us by Jesus Christ. 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 266.]

Over thirty years ago Scotland was overwhelmed by a great commercial disaster through the failure of one of its leading banks. It was a calamity that could not stand alone, and day after day the strongest business houses were compelled to suspend payment. The distress brought upon the shareholders, many of them widows and orphans brought in a single morning to poverty, was so great that a gigantic lottery of six millions sterling was proposed. One half of these millions was to be given to subscribers. The other half was to be given to relieve the distress of those who were impoverished. The object seemed so praiseworthy, and the misery was so widespread and so extreme, that many of the wisest and clearest minds in Scotland gave it their support. Suddenly Principal Rainy, the foremost Christian minister of this land in his day, raised his voice. In a letter full of invincible argument, couched in courteous and appealing terms, he protested against this appeal to the very passions and follies, the greed and the gambling, which had produced the ruin. The scheme was dropped in a day. He had bound and loosed the consciences of men. All Scotland understood, for one moment at least, the true meaning of the power of the keys. 2 [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 64.]

2. The power given by these words perhaps goes further still, and implies, under certain extraordinary conditions, fitness and qualification to pronounce an unerring spiritual judgment upon the soul’s relation to God. And this leads us to ask the question, Upon what conditions does this power of opening and closing the Kingdom of Heaven, and of retaining and remitting the sin of men, rest? We observe, in the first case, that nothing whatever was promised to Peter, except so far as he was already the subject of a teaching inspiration, and was to become so in a yet richer degree in future days. He held the keys, and could bind and loose in so far as the Son was revealed to him by the Father and the Father by the Son, and not one iota beyond. He could not open the gates of the Kingdom by any private authority and apart from the possession of these truths. Then we come to the promise of this same power to the whole congregation of the disciples. There is no power of binding and loosing apart from Christ’s indwelling presence within the Church. And then we come to the last case. Christ connected the power of absolution with a symbolic act, in which He made the disciples recipients of His own life, and partakers and instruments of the Holy Ghost by that fellowship. But it will be observed that there is no valid retention or remission of sin that can be pronounced to men, except by the lips of which the Holy Ghost is the unceasing breath. Given that condition in the case of either priest or layman, one may safely extend to him the power of absolution.

As the doctor takes the key of his drug-store and selects from the specifics that are arranged around him, he kills or makes alive. His key means a power of absolution. When it is first put into his hand he is instructed with as solemn a responsibility as the Judge who pronounces death-sentences. When he selects this drug, or looks upon that as hopeless to apply under the conditions into which the patient has fallen, he is dealing with questions of life and death. And so Christ in His closing admonitions to the disciples teaches that they are not dealing with speculative truth only. The doctrine they are set forth to disseminate is not, like the curious and trivial questions discussed by some of the Rabbis, a matter that cannot possibly affect the spiritual well-being of a single human soul in the slightest degree. They are not following out questions that have a hypothetical value only. It is not for some idle debate in the groves that they are setting forth in the scanty outfit of couriers. They are commissioned to deal with grave, spiritual destinies. “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 268.]

We are told that, throughout the strain of the civil war in America, Abraham Lincoln found a true priest in the godly and much-suffering woman who had charge of his children. He, who became more powerful than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his countrymen for the man he was, tells us how he was sustained in that awful crisis of national calamity and personal sorrow by the prayers in his behalf of this stricken, yet believing woman. She knew God, Lincoln felt, so she became God’s priest to Lincoln. He resorted to her for intercession on his behalf—he who would, as one truly remarks, have treated with “courteous and civil incredulity a proffer of sacerdotal good offices from Cardinal Gibbons.” 2 [Note: A. Shepherd, Bible Studies in Living Subjects, 231.]

3. Yet the responsibility is always with the man himself. To each soul personally God gives the keys of his own destiny and bids him unlock life’s closed doors; puts in his hands the rudder and bids him steer his bark; gives him the tools and bids him model his own character. This is the most solemn fact of all, for this is an undivided and unshared responsibility. I may throw on others the blame for the failure of the State and the sins of the Church; but for my decisions respecting my own life I am alone responsible. In vain the reluctant receiver protests against taking the key of his own life; in vain he endeavours to pass it to some other one; in vain he seeks to avoid the necessity of deciding life’s problems and making life’s choice. Sometimes he seeks a father-confessor and asks him to take the key and bind and loose his life for him; and the father-confessor may accept the trust. But it is in vain. Every one of us shall give account of himself to God. Whether the father-confessor sits in a priest’s chair, or in a Protestant minister’s chair, or in a religious editor’s chair, he can take no responsibility; he can give counsel, but that is all. To each soul God has given the keys; each soul must bind and loose for itself.

A father whose wealth is in ships and warehouses and railroads, but who has an acre garden attached to the country homestead, summons his boys one spring, as he is going to Europe, and says to them, “I put this garden in your charge; spend what you will; cultivate according to your own best judgment; send the product to the market; and account to me for sales and expenditures when I get home.” “But, Father,” say the boys, “what shall we sow?” “I cannot tell you; you must judge for yourselves.” “Where shall we sell?” “Find out for yourselves.” “What prices ought we to get?” “Learn for yourselves.” “But, Father, we know nothing about gardening; we shall make dreadful mistakes.” “No doubt you will,” replies the father, “and you will learn by your mistakes; and it is your learning, not the gardening, I care for.” “But, Father, we are afraid we shall bankrupt you.” The father laughs and replies. “You cannot bankrupt me, if you try, with a summer’s gardening on an acre plot.” “But, Father,” finally protest the boys, “we are afraid that when you come back and see how poorly we have done you will find fault with us and be sorry that you gave us such a trust.” And the father catches up a piece of paper and writes upon it: “Know all men by these presents that I hereby appoint my boys, James and John, my true and lawful attorneys, to do all things that may be necessary in the cultivation and charge of my acre garden, and I hereby ratify and confirm beforehand whatever they may do.” And he signs it, hands it to them, and goes his way. So God gives to us, His children, in this summer day out of eternity which we call life, and on this little acre plot of ground out of the universe which we call the world, the responsibility and the liberty involved in the charge of our own destinies, and with this He gives power of attorney promising beforehand to ratify and confirm whatever we do in loyal service to Him and in loyal allegiance to His name and honour. 1 [Note: L. Abbott, Signs of Promise, 187.]

Whatever may have been the influences which concurred in effecting this fundamental transformation in Dr. Martineau’s philosophical system, there can be little doubt that when he preached the striking sermon on “The Christian View of Moral Evil” the process was virtually completed. That discourse gives expression in the most emphatic terms to the doctrine of Ethical Individualism, which forms the keynote of his moral philosophy. “This sense,” he says, “of individual accountability—notwithstanding the ingenuity of orthodox divines on the one hand, and necessarian philosophers on the other—is impaired by all reference of the evil that is in us to any source beyond ourselves.… There is no persuasion more indispensable to this state of mind, and consequently no impression which Christianity more profoundly leaves upon the heart, than that of the personal origin and personal identity of sin,—its individual incommunicable character.… Hence it appears impossible to defend the doctrines of Philosophical Necessity—which presents God to us as the author of sin and suffering—from the charge of invading the sense of personal responsibility.” 1 [Note: The Life and Letters of James Martineau, ii. 271.]

The Keys of the Kingdom

Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 175.

Book (W. H.), The Columbus Tabernacle Sermons, 71.

Burrell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 306.

Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 57.

Fraser (J.), Parochial and Other Sermons, 302.

Howatt (J. R.), Jesus the Poet, 151.

Jerdan (C.), Gospel Milk and Honey, 54.

Lewis (L. H.), Petros, 65.

Norton (J. W.), Golden Truths, 326.

Selby (T. G.), The Imperfect Angel, 261.

Wright (W. B.), The World to Come, 45.

Church of England Pulpit, lxii. 376 (F. R. M. Hitchcock).

Church Family Newspaper, Feb. 17, 1911 (F. S. Webster).

Verse 24

The Cost of Discipleship

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.— Matthew 16:24.

These words were spoken by our Lord when He first began definitely to prepare the minds of His disciples for the humiliation, and suffering, and death which lay before Him. The conception of a suffering Messiah was so alien to the thought of His time that it became needful to prepare the minds of His immediate followers for receiving the Divine idea of self-sacrifice, which He was to reveal in His sufferings and death. “From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.” One of them, with characteristic impulsiveness, repudiated the idea; and Jesus, reading at once the earthly thoughts which prompted the remonstrance of Peter, laid down the indispensable condition of spiritual life, the Divine law of self-sacrifice: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever would save his life, shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it.”

1. There was a special truth in these words for the disciples to whom they were spoken; and to them they were primarily addressed. No one could become a faithful follower of Jesus without being prepared to renounce everything, without carrying his life itself in his hand. And the first desire of Jesus in speaking these words was undoubtedly to make Peter and the rest of his companions understand clearly the absolute degree of the self-sacrifice which they must make in spirit, if they would be thoroughly associated with the Leader in whom they believed. He was going before them bearing His cross, submitting beforehand to the ignominy and pain which were to be openly realized; He was thus submitting, not in spite of His Divine nature, but because He was the perfect Son of the righteous and loving Father. If His disciples would cherish the high ambition of being His friends and followers; if they would look forward to the joy and the crown with which true sacrifice was to be rewarded—they also must tread in the steps of the Master, they must be content to serve and submit, they must gird themselves to the unreserved offering of themselves to God.

2. The Christian life also is one of service, of submission. Men do not sit and sing themselves away to everlasting bliss; the way thither is the way of the yoke. Christ is very frank about this; He allures no man to follow Him by false pretences. When men would follow Garibaldi to the liberty of Italy, he warned them that there would be hunger and thirst and fatigue, battle and wounds and death to be endured. Those who would follow must be willing to bear the yoke. When men would follow Christ, He frankly said, “Take my yoke upon you”—the yoke of service, of self-denial, of submission. “He that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.”

When Bernard of Quintavalle, convinced of the rare grace granted by God to Francis, and longing to come under its power, determined to join him, the saint, notwithstanding his joy, gave proof of that sound judgment upon which the commune had learned to draw, by proposing that since the life of renunciation was hard, they must lay the whole matter before the Lord, who would Himself be its judge and their counsellor. So they repaired to St. Nicholas’ Church, and, after the office, knelt long in prayer for guidance. The curate of St. Nicholas was their friend, and he consulted the gospel text when their minds were prepared to accept its mandates. The first time he opened it these words met his eyes: “Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up thy cross, and follow me.” The second time, the very gospel which had lately impelled Francis to preach was on the open page ( Luke 9:1-6), while the third test of Bernard’s faith was found to be the great and strenuous commandment: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Bernard bowed his head in obedience to all three, and leaving the church, he and Francis at once set about selling his houses and possessions, and bestowing the money realized on hospitals, poor monasteries, the neediest townsfolk. Then, having finished this affair, the brothers passed down to the plain, and a new stage in the Franciscan movement was initiated. 1 [Note: Anna M. Stoddart, Francis of Assisi, 95.]

There are three things in the text—

I. Self-denial—“Let him deny himself.”

II. Cross-bearing—“And take up his cross.”

III. Following—“And follow me.”

I

Self-Denial

“Let him deny himself.”

1. “If any man would come after me,” said Jesus, “let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” Here Jesus makes the duty of denying self an essential requisite of Christian discipleship. A man cannot be a follower of Jesus unless he denies himself, or, as the Greek term indicates, denies himself utterly. The requirement is not the denial of anything, either little or much, to self, but the utter denial of self—a very important and too often unrecognized difference.

As the term stands in the Greek, the injunction of our Lord to His every disciple, to “deny himself,” includes the idea of turning oneself away from oneself, of rejecting self as the desire of self. It suggests the thought of two centres—self and Christ—the one to be denied and the other accepted as an object of attraction and devotedness. Its use in the original seems to say: “If you would turn toward Me, you must turn away from yourself. If you would accept Me as the chief object of desire, you must renounce yourself as such an object. If you would henceforward live in My service, you must at once cease to live for your own pleasure and interest.”

It is a very common mistake concerning the nature of self-denial to suppose that it involves a constant thought of self, in order to the entire subjection of self. As a matter of fact, he who lives the truest life of self-denial has very little trouble with himself. Being absorbed in an object of interest outside of himself, he forgets himself; living for something worthier of his devotion, he does not give any worrying thought to that self from which he has turned away in his enthusiastic pursuit of a nobler aim. A soldier is worth little as a soldier until he forgets himself in his interest in his military duties. If he even thinks of prolonging or protecting his life, he is more likely to lose it than if he is absorbed in the effort to do his work manfully as a soldier. An unselfish interest in our fellows causes us to forget ourselves in our loving thought of others. An unselfish interest in our Friend of friends takes us away from ourselves, and fills our mind with a simple purpose of pleasing and serving Him. A life of self-denial is not a life of conflict with self; it is rather a life turned away from self in utter self-forgetfulness.

Self-denial is not an outward act, but an inward turning of our being. As the steamship is turned about by the rudder, which is swung by the means of a wheel, so there is within our being a rudder, or whatever you may call it, which is turned by a small wheel, and as we turn the entire craft either leeward or windward, we deny either self or God. In its deepest sense we always deny either the one or the other. When we stand well we deny self; in all other cases we deny God. And the internal wheel by which we turn the entire craft of our ego is our intention. The rudder determines the course of the ship; not its rigging and cargo, nor the character of the crew, but its direction, the destination of the voyage, its final haven. Hence, when we see our craft steering away from God, we swing the rudder the other way and compel it to run toward God. 1 [Note: A. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 505.]

2. We have often to deny ourselves in matters that may be in themselves allowable. If they tend in our case to withdraw our hearts from Christ, we must be willing to give them up. Being innocent in themselves, we might be at liberty to choose them or not as we liked, but we have to think of the discipline and maturity of our Christian character, and in regard to this such voluntary sacrifices are in the sight of God of great price, moulding us as they do into a loving and wide embracing obedience to Him. Again and again we may have to deny ourselves things that seem fitted for adding to our enjoyment, but when we think how Christ denied Himself the most ordinary comforts, not seeking to be ministered unto, but to minister, and giving His life a ransom for us, shall we for a moment hesitate to drink of His spirit that we may do likewise? Very anxiously have we to remember that there is no Christian self-denial in anything that is done merely as self-denial—that all true self-sacrifice is unconscious of itself, strives not to think of itself, but longs simply to please Christ and to do His will and work, without reckoning the cost or trial.

It is said that prior to the rise of Christianity not one of the Western languages had any word for self-denial. The austere moralists of India, indeed, had long since taught the sacrifice of inclination to lofty ideals of duty. But Greece and Rome, nay, even Israel, had not contemplated self-denial as in itself essential to virtuous or devout character; and so they had coined no word for it. But when one by one the Western nations were subdued by the spiritual weapons sharpened in the armoury of Christ, the idea and the word “self-denial” quickly came to the front in preaching and in practice. Nor will any student of the Gospels deny that this is quite a characteristic and typical utterance of Jesus: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” 1 [Note: R. C. Armstrong, Memoir and Sermons, 195.]

(1) We are constantly tempted to self-indulgence, to do simply what is easy and pleasant to us, agreeable to our tastes, inclinations, and habits, and leave others to do or leave undone altogether the things that are not according to our taste or that require from us any care or effort or sacrifice. All analogy, and all reason, and all Scripture teach us that we must not consult our own ease and pleasure, that we must not make a kind of pastime of religious service, that we must not be earnest and self-denying in our ordinary calling, and then come to Christ’s work as an entertainment for our leisure hours, just playing with the great cause of God. We must not do that; we must work if we would have God to work with us. It is when we do our part that we have any right at all to expect that God will do His part; it is when we do our very best—and we cannot do our very best without much thought, and much prayer, and much effort; without facing difficulties, without strain, without doing some hard things, some painful things. We cannot do our best without all this, and it is when we do our best that we can expect God to do the most.

You have all, I dare say, seen lightning conductors put up on buildings in London; and perhaps you wondered why they were put up. Well the reason is this: the lightning is on the look out for an easy way to come down to the earth; it finds it very hard to go through the air. That is the reason why we hear the thunder: it is the noise the lightning makes because it has to come through the air so quickly. And the air tries to stop it coming at all. If it could get on to anything—on to the spire of this church, for example—and slide down, it would be a very easy way of getting along. But it wouldn’t be a good thing for the spire; and so they put up lightning conductors—rods right up into the air—so that if the lightning is coming anywhere near, it may get on to the rod and so slip right down into the earth, without doing any harm to the church. For it is always looking out for the easiest way down. 1 [Note: J. M. Gibbon, In the Days of Youth, 60.]

(2) Self-seeking is another form of temptation that we must guard against. We are tempted to serve ourselves in God’s service, to seek for our own ends when we are professedly and really engaged in His work. Sometimes the selfish end is indirectly sought by us, as when it is the glory, honour, power, and triumph of our party or sect or denomination that we labour for. Sometimes the selfish end is directly before us, as when it is our own influence, or position, or honour, or praise that we seek after. The love of man’s approbation is natural to us, and it is quite legitimate that we should seek it, and that we should appreciate it; but how very apt it is to degenerate into downright selfishness, and how very often we are tempted in connexion with God’s own work to seek chiefly, to seek unduly, our own selfish ends.

You remember that wonderful parable in the Peer Gynt of Ibsen. The worn-out wanderer, grown hoary in selfishness, a past-master in self-seeking, in a rare moment of reflection takes an onion in his hand, and begins to strip it, scale by scale, and the fancy takes him that each scale or flake or lobe or fold represents some experience of his past, some relation in which he has stood to others in the long and chequered experience of life. This one is Peer Gynt tossed “in the jolly-boat after the wreck.” This is Peer Gynt a steerage passenger sailing westward over the Atlantic. This is Peer Gynt the merchant, this Peer Gynt as he played the prophet. What a host of parts he has played! What a host of folds lie around the central core or kernel of the onion! When he comes to the actual centre, that will stand for Peer Gynt himself, his inner self, apart from all the parts he has played, apart from all the relations to others he has held. And he strips and strips, smaller and smaller are the onion-flakes as he nears the centre. What will the centre be? And in his impatience he tears half a dozen away at once.

There seem a terrible lot of flakes,

To get to the core what a time it takes!

Yes, gramercy, it does, one divides and divides;

And there is no kernel: it’s all outsides!

That is the parable as the great Scandinavian dramatist has written it. And it is a parable which may be variously applied. Strip away from your life, your soul, every relation in which you stand to other lives, other souls, than your own. You may think thereby to reach at last your own very life or soul; but you will find that there is no self there. You live only in your relations to others than yourself. Annihilate these and you are yourself annihilated. 1 [Note: R. A. Armstrong, Memoir and Sermons, 223.]

II

Cross-Bearing

“And take up his cross.”

1. Cross-bearing is usually regarded as the bearing of burdens, or the enduring of trials in Christ’s service, or for Christ’s sake. It is impossible to give ourselves up to Christ without suffering some loss or trouble. In early days the consequence might be martyrdom; in our own day it always involves some sacrifice. Now, the cross which the Christian has to bear is not inevitable trouble, such as poverty, sickness, or the loss of friends by death. These things would have been in our lot if we had not been Christians. They are our burdens, our thorns in the flesh. They are sent to us, not taken by us. But the cross is something additional. This is taken up voluntarily; it is in our power to refuse to touch it. We bear it, not because we cannot escape, but because it is a consequence of our following Christ; and the good of bearing it is that we cannot otherwise closely follow Him. He, then, is the true Christian who will bear any cross and endure any hardship that is involved in loyally following his Lord and Master.

When Jesus found His disciples expectant of honours in His service as the Messiah, and longing for places nearest Him when He should be uplifted in His Kingdom, He told them that they little knew what they were asking. His first uplifting was to be on a cross. Would they be willing to share that experience with Him? “Ye know not what ye ask,” He said. “Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink?” It costs something, He suggested, to be My follower. A man who enlists in My service must do so with a halter round his neck. If he cares more for his life than for Me, he is unfitted to be one of My disciples. “If any man cometh unto me, and hateth not [in comparison with me] his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. Whosoever doth not bear his own cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.”

Tertullian, speaking to us out of the second century, tells us how the Christians of his day were wont to carry about with them everywhere the sign of the cross, at every step, at every movement, sealing themselves with it. It is now honoured and consecrated; our very churches are built in its shape and ornamented with its figure. But then, to those poor Galileans, who had left all to follow Christ, who dimly dreamed of kingliness and victor pomp, of thrones on the right and thrones on the left, and the fulfilment of patriotic dreams—taking up the cross, it was a thing strange and abhorrent, and contrary to their religious convictions, “Cursed is every one that hangeth on the tree.” 1 [Note: Canon Newbolt.]

The idea of these words, says Ruskin, “has been exactly reversed by modern Protestantism, which sees in the Cross, not a furca to which it is to be nailed; but a raft on which it, and all its valuable properties, are to be floated into Paradise.” We need but superficial knowledge of current ways of speaking and writing among some religious people to know that there is much that goes a good way to excuse or to justify this very severe criticism. 2 [Note: E. F. Sampson, Christ Church Sermons, 265.]

2. Each has his particular cross to bear. This we have each to discover for ourselves, and bear as we follow Him. Never are we to invent crosses for ourselves, and most anxiously are we to take heed that we do not make them for others, for this would indeed be to sin against God, and to bring continued misery on those beside us. Our own cross is close at hand, and we are to see rising high above it that awful yet most blessed and now vacant cross on which the Son of God suffered that He might win us back to the Father. We think how much easier it would be for us, and how much more devout and vigorous a Christian life we should lead, if we could but “change” our own cross for some other one that we imagine we could readily name, thus wishing even our trials to be bent to our own self-will, and suited to what we think for our comfort. We think that we can judge of the crosses which others have to bear, and that ours is often so much heavier than theirs. We may even magnify our own cross until it almost shuts out of view that awe-inspiring cross on which our Saviour offered Himself unto death. We may have sore trial from some beside us, owing to our “choosing that good part” which He sets before us, and we may have daily to bear this cross, which in His wise permission. He allows to be laid upon us, although we feel that by only a little change in their disposition they themselves would be blessed, and all life made different to us.

There is a poem called The Changed Cross. It represents a weary one who thought that her cross was surely heavier than those of others whom she saw about her, and wished that she might choose another instead of her own. She slept, and in her dream she was led to a place where many crosses lay, crosses of divers shapes and sizes. There was a little one most beauteous to behold, set in jewels and gold. “Ah, this I can wear with comfort,” she said. So she took it up, but her weak form shook beneath it. The jewels and the gold were beautiful, but they were far too heavy for her. Next she saw a lovely cross with fair flowers entwined around its sculptured form. Surely that was the one for her. She lifted it, but beneath the flowers were piercing thorns which tore her flesh. At last, as she went on, she came to a plain cross, without jewels, without carving, with only a few words of love inscribed upon it. This she took up, and it proved the best of all, the easiest to be borne. And as she looked upon it, bathed in the radiance that fell from heaven, she recognized her own old cross. She had found it again, and it was the best of all and lightest for her.

God knows best what cross we need to bear. We do not know how heavy other people’s crosses are. We envy some one who is rich; his is a golden cross set with jewels. But we do not know how heavy it is. Here is another whose life seems very lovely. She bears a cross twined with flowers. But we do not know what sharp thorns are hidden beneath the flowers. If we could try all the other crosses that we think lighter than ours, we should at last find that not one of them suited us so well as our own. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses Through Life’s Windows, 31.]

III

Following the Master

“And follow me.”

1. Christ pictures Himself here, not as the Redeemer, but as the Leader and Pattern. It was a great event for the world when there was born into it the Perfect Man. Formerly the children of men were aware that they fell short of the perfection that was in God; but they did not suspect that one born of woman could actually attain such holiness. Jesus disclosed what man could be and do.

Mechanics are well aware that the engines on which they spend their powers are far from perfect. But, if some day a machine immensely superior to any that had been produced were devised and constructed by one of themselves, the whole trade would at once undergo a revolution. Employers, designers, draughtsmen, moulders, finishers, fitters, the whole population of the place, would vie with one another in their efforts to equal or surpass the achievement. If, perhaps, like ignorant Russian peasants, they broke the splendid instrument, or if they put it into a glass case as a mere curiosity, yet, after a while, a wiser counsel would prevail. Our great Fellow-workman produced a matchless work; and although for a time His jealous comrades endeavoured to crush it and to suppress the very mention of it, yet, in the end, they began to copy it. The life of Jesus, if it had been an example and nothing more, must certainly have left its mark on the customs of the world. 2 [Note: C. N. Moody, Love’s Long Campaign, 255.]

2. It has been suggested that this phrase, though authentic, may perhaps be misplaced as we have it here in Matthew, and may refer to an incident of that dolorous procession in which the Master—Himself for a little while mastered by His foes—was struggling towards the appointed place of tragedy with the huge, rough cross upon His shoulder, ere some flickering of pity on the part of His guards impressed the more muscular Simon of Cyrene to bear the instrument of death along the road. We are invited to behold Jesus with gentle fortitude struggling to bear up under the cruel load, and even then, while the weight of the cross is pressing on His worn and sensitive frame, uttering the precept which had in that moment illustration so terrible: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”

The disciple was to be as his Master, the servant was to be as his Lord; but the Master was to be a crucified Master; the Lord was to be not merely nailed to the tree, He was to bear His cross to the place of execution. And which of them all could have foreseen that awful end? Which of them could have guessed that the degrading punishment, reserved for the basest criminals, would have been assigned to the pure and sinless Jesus? Which of them could have thought that against this humble working-man Prophet the power of Rome would accomplish that which His own nation could not do? Which of them who had believed it possible that He would die upon the cross could have realized that, faint and weary with suffering, He Himself would bear His cross on the road to Calvary, till He could bear it no longer?

Last night I had another mother’s meeting for the mothers of the Free Kindergarten. This time I gave a magic-lantern show. I was the showman. The poor, ignorant women sat there bewildered; they had never seen a piano, and many of them had never been close to a foreigner before. I showed them about a hundred slides, explained through an interpreter until I was hoarse, gesticulated and orated to no purpose. They remained silent, stolid. By and by there was a stir, heads were raised and necks craned. A sudden interest swept over the room. I followed their gaze, and saw on the sheet the picture of Christ toiling up the mountain under the burden of the cross. The story was new and strange to them, but the fact was as old as life itself. At last they had found something that touched their own lives and brought the quick tears of sympathy to their eyes. 1 [Note: The Lady of the Decoration, 107.]

3. Christ appeals to the will. “If a man wills to come after me.” The cross must be taken up consciously, deliberately, sympathetically. The sacrifice we see in nature is unconscious. When the outer row of petals is sacrificed to the welfare of the guelder rose, the petals are unaware of their immolation; when the bracts wither which have cradled the young leaves of the tree, they perish without any sense of martyrdom. In all their sacrificial work the ant and wasp obey blind impulse. It is often little better in society. We suffer and die for others without realizing the fact. The thought of the genius, the statesman, the physician, and the nurse is often almost entirely self-regarding; they really suffer for the commonwealth without either consciousness or intention. The superior civilization also suffers for the inferior unsympathetically. The bee is a self-centred creature; when it visits a flower it does not think of adorning the plant, of filling the air with sweetness, of delighting human eyes; it thinks only of getting a living, of enjoying itself; yet all the while, unknown to itself, it conveys the pollen which secures the perfection and perpetuity of a thousand flowers. So the European visiting India, Africa, or China does not always realize the larger mission he is fulfilling—advancing civilization by sacrifice. The scientist explores strange lands for knowledge, the soldier for glory, the trader for gold, the emigrant for bread; and yet, all unwittingly, above and beyond their immediate purpose, they impart to the strange regions they penetrate the ideas and qualities of a higher civilization.

In Christ the principle of self-denial became conscious, voluntary, and delightful. He entered into the work of redemption with clearest knowledge, entire sympathy, absolute willingness, and overflowing love. From all His doing and suffering for our salvation come freedom, readiness, and joyfulness. His true disciples share His spirit of intelligent self-sacrifice: consciously, willingly, lovingly, they serve the world and one another. Self-immolation, which is unconscious in the brute, which dimly awakes to the knowledge of itself in reflective humanity, realizes itself lucidly and joyously in the light, love, and liberty of Christ. “Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” “I delight to do thy will, O my God.” Such was the spirit and language of the Master in the hour of Gethsemane, in the presence of Calvary. The disciple must not rest until he attains something of the same conscious surrender and joy.

Phillips Brooks reminds us that the sacrifice of old was offered to the sound of the trumpets with joy, and there ought to be a sort of joy—a real joy—about self-sacrifice in bearing the cross. The pictures of our Lord on the cross, the earliest representations, were not like later ones; they were of a victorious figure in the prime of life, with no nails through His hands and feet, with an upright head, and a look of joyful self-sacrifice. And that is what we must aim at: we must bear the cross joyfully; “take up” the cross—it makes all the difference—lying down under it is one thing, taking it up is another. Take it up bravely, joyfully, cheerfully, and you will find the cross comparatively easy to bear. 1 [Note: A. F. W. Ingram, Joy in God, 178.]

But if Himself He come to thee, and stand

Beside thee, gazing down on thee with eyes

That smile and suffer, that will smite thy heart,

With their own pity, to a passionate peace;

And reach to thee Himself the Holy Cup

(With all its wreathen stems of passion-flowers

And quivering sparkles of the ruby stars),

Pallid and royal, saying, “Drink with Me,”

Wilt thou refuse? Nay, not for Paradise! 2 [Note: H. E. Hamilton King.]

4. Discipleship demands perseverance. “Let him follow me.” There is no discharge in this service. It is a lifelong compact. The disciple must follow the Master to the last limit of self-denial and cross-bearing. But the Master lives to help us to be and to do what He shows in His own life is the highest of all goodness and nobleness. So near does He keep to us in His indwelling Presence that He wishes to strengthen us to “walk even as he walked” ( 1 John 2:6). We are to feel that though we cannot see Him with our bodily eyes, yet there is no such living Power in the universe as He is; and as we continue to ponder His life and sufferings we shall seem to see Him standing out before our hearts “full of grace and truth,” and shall become gradually transformed into His likeness so as to be fitted for living with Him through eternity in His unveiled vision, and for engaging in His sinless service.

It is easy to take up one’s cross and stand; easier still to fold it in the arms and lie down; but to carry it about—that is the hard thing. All pain shuns locomotion. It is adverse to collision, adverse to contact, adverse to movement. It craves to nurse its own bitterness; it longs to be alone. Its burden is never so heavy as when the bell rings for daily toil. The waters of Marah seek repose. If I could only rest under my cloud I might endure; but the command is too much for me—“Go, work to-day in my vineyard.” If I could go without my cross, it would be something; but I cannot. I can no more escape from it than I can escape my own shadow. It clings to me with that attraction which repulsion sometimes gives. It says, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.” 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Searchings in the Silence, 56.]

The followers of Christ are not as Frederick the Great, who in the midst of the Seven Years’ War wrote thus: “Happy the moment when I took to training myself in philosophy! There is nothing else that can sustain the soul in a situation like mine.” This same Frederick, three years later, wrote that it was hard for man to bear what he endured: “My philosophy is worn out by suffering,” he confessed; “I am no saint, like those of whom we read in the legends; and I will own that I should die content if only I could first inflict a portion of the misery which I endure.” But Charity never faileth. When Christians grow weary of their efforts, when they are tempted to give up their Christian service because of discouragements in the work, or because of rebuffs and unkindness from their fellow-workers, they remember what sort of Captain they follow, and what sort of strength has been vouchsafed to them. 2 [Note: C. N. Moody, Love’s Long Campaign, 266.]

Drawing his sword, Pizarro traced a line with it on the sand from east to west. Then, turning towards the south, “Friends and comrades!” he said, “on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.” So saying he stepped across the line. He was followed by the brave pilot Ruiz; next by Pedro de Candia, a cavalier, born, as his name imports, in one of the isles of Greece. Eleven others successively crossed the line, thus intimating their willingness to abide the fortunes of their leader, for good or for evil. Fame, to quote the enthusiastic language of an ancient chronicler, has commemorated the names of this little band, “who thus, in the face of difficulties unexampled in history, with death rather than riches for their reward, preferred it all to abandoning their honour, and stood firm by their leader as an example of loyalty to future ages.” 1 [Note: W. H. Prescott, The Conquest of Peru, bk. ii. chap. iv.]

The Cost of Discipleship

Armstrong (R. A.), Memoir and Sermons, 195.

Bishop (J. W.), The Christian Year and the Christian Life, 117.

Black (J.), The Pilgrim Ship, 189.

Butler (W. A.), Sermons, i. 24.

Gibbon (J. M.), In the Days of Youth, 59.

Lawlor (H. J.), Thoughts on Belief and Life, 62.

Mackenzie (R.), The Loom of Providence, 69.

Macpherson (W. M.), The Path of Life, 198.

Matheson (G.), Searchings in the Silence, 56.

Moody (C. N.), Love’s Long Campaign, 114.

Parker (J.), The City Temple, ii. 258.

Sampson (E. F.), Christ Church Sermons, 265.

Trumbull (H. C.), Our Misunderstood Bible, 130.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), ii. (1862), No. 323.

Vickery (J.), Ideals of Life, 295.

Watkinson (W. L.), The Supreme Conquest, 158.

Watson (J.), Respectable Sins, 83.

Christian World Pulpit, vii. 305 (D. Thomas); xii. 394 (H. W. Beecher); lvii. 219 (C. Gore).

Church of England Pulpit, liii. 163 (J. P. Sandlands).

Church Family Newspaper, April 7, 1911 (W. C. E. Newbolt).