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with the work of our Lord, in which the works of God are manifested in affliction. He, the worker of miracles, was the Good Physician, the true sympathiser with His brethren in the troubles which they had to bear. When He healed the sick and cast out the devils, He was fulfilling, St. Matthew tells us, the prophecy of Isaiah, that He should take our infirmities and bear our sicknesses. It was our sin, our infirmities, our sorrows, that called forth His tenderness, and compassion, and healing power. In every suffering man with whom He came in contact a work of God was made manifest, not in the miracle of power alone, but in the miracle of love. The disorder in the world is not merely therefore to suggest the order of which it is the opposite; it is to manifest the work of God by kindling in those who share it the tenderness and sympathy which He came from heaven to show. So are we to fill up what remains of the sufferings of Christ. Evil is to be the occasion for good. Because there are burdens-not the less because they are the fruit of sin-we are to bear each other's, and so fulfil the law of Christ. Every reformatory and hospital, every machinery for relieving suffering, every gracious act of mercy, every word of true sympathy, is a mani

festation of the work of God. The sufferings were not created that these might abound. They are but the dark shadows of our state; but they are shadows which speak of the light which shall one day dispel them. When we are brought into the presence of a sick man, we dare not ask, "Has this man sinned, or his parents?" We know that he has sinned, and that all his race has sinned; and we minister to him, not because we are exempt from the universal curse, but because we share it with him. Doubtless

the disciples went their way with new-opened eyes, because they came to their Master with the desire to see. His words had led them to look into themselves, to see the darkness that was there, and to yearn for the light. And as they learned that they themselves had sinned, and their parents, they would look with “larger other eyes" upon the poor brother whom they had been inclined to shun with the caste feeling of the Pharisee. They had learned much about their fellow-men; much more, it may be, about themselves; much also about God. To them the "thoughts that spring out of human suffering" must thenceforth have taken new shape. For their eyes had been opened to see that God was a jealous God-jealous of His will being

done, because that will was good-forced to punish all infractions of His will because, if goodness is order and happiness, evil must needs be disorder and misery. And so learning, they came to know that punishment is discipline; that God chastens, not because He hates, but because He loves us; and that the sense of our common suffering must awaken in those whom Christ redeemed the sense of a common brotherhood and the responsibilities it entails.

Such, my brethren, are the lessons of the blind man who was restored to sight by the Lord of light Himself. Unless Christ has lived and died for us in vain, we must accept the lessons which such history teaches; thankful that death and disease testify to Him who is the Author of life and health, and who can deliver us from that most terrible blindness of all-the darkness of eternal death.

SERMON XIV.

ANGER, NOBLE AND IGNOBLE.

(MARCH 6TH, 1870.)

"Be ye angry, and sin not."-EPH. iv. 26.

IN this injunction, delivered by St. Paul to a body of Christians, the privilege and duty of anger, as well as the danger attending its display, are fully recognized. The command is so striking-even, we must say, so unusual-in its form, that there have been those who would explain it away, or tone it down till it is quite colourless. It is a concession, they say, rather than a command. Anger is a passion so irresistible that it would be useless to forbid it. Be angry, since it must be so; but do not encourage or protract the feeling. If it is not in mortals to avoid experiencing the emotion, let them at least get rid of it as soon as may be. But I do not think, my brethren, that St. Paul, if he had

meant only this, would have risked the certain misunderstanding of his words. It is not the way of the first Christian teachers to put concessions into the form of commands. The Christian standard was so high that it repelled, rather than attracted, the half-hearted. "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." This was the Apostle's message, as it had been his Master's. You may depend upon it he is not contradicting that message here. On the contrary, in the words immediately preceding our text he has been holding up to his Ephesian disciples a very high example indeed. He has told them to "put off the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of their minds; to put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." He is telling them to make the righteousness of God their aim and their enthusiasm. They are God's children; they are brethren one of another. They were to keep always before them both facts of their being, and let the remembrance guide their conduct. They should put away lying, and speak truth every man with his neighbour, because they were members one of another. And then follow the very words before us, "Be ye angry, and sin not;

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