Roman Government, one who sat daily at the receipt of custom, driving a trade essentially secular. Yet God Incarnate crossed his path, and singled him out of the throng as one who should draw many souls, minted anew with the image and superscription of the Heavenly King, into the treasury of God, and sat at meat in his house in company with many publicans and sinners, and set him upon one of the twelve thrones, which Apostles shall visibly occupy in the regeneration of all things, and placed around his brow, as a coronet, the Pentecostal tongue of fire. It is a great lesson that, if only our hearts are right and true, we may find Christ, or rather may be found of Him,-in the traffic of secular affairs. May we so learn this lesson, as to know it, not in theory only, but by experience!

"There are in this loud stunning tide

Of human care and crime,

With whom the melodies abide
Of the everlasting chime;
Who carry music in their heart,

Through dusky lane and wrangling mart;
Plying their daily task with busier feet,

Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat."

CHAPTER IV.

OF INTERRUPTIONS IN OUR WORK, AND THE WAY TO DEAL WITH THEM.

"We are created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them."-EPI. ii. 10.

WE have spoken in the two foregoing Chapters of the work which God has allotted to us, and of the spirit which must be thrown into it, if we would convert it into a sacrifice. He who tries to infuse this spirit into his daily work will do it earnestly. He will throw all his

powers of heart and soul into it; and whereas before much of his duty has been done mechanically, his nobler faculties will now be called into exercise in the doing of it. It will all be done thoughtfully and seriously, and mixed with prayer, the highest effort of which the mind is capable.

And the very earnestness with which the work is now done may bring with it a snare. When the mind is intently bent upon one action, and that action is felt to be a serious one, it is greatly embarrassed and annoyed by interruptions. Other things making a claim upon the attention, distract and harass us. Of course it is not so with the man who hangs about upon life with no serious pursuit. Interruptions are to him a pleasing variety; nor can he at all appreciate the trial of which we speak. But in proportion to the seriousness with which the Christian does his work will be, if I may so say, his sensitiveness to interruptions. And as this sensitiveness is very apt to disturb his peace, (and in doing so to retard his progress,) we will in this Chapter show the manner in which interruptions should be met, and the spirit with which they should be encountered.

The great remedy, then, for the sensitiveness to which I have alluded, is a closer study of the mind that was in Christ, as that mind transpires in His recorded conduct. The point in the life of Our Lord to which I wish to call attention, is the apparent want of what may be called method or plan in His life,-I mean method or plan of His own devising, the fact that His good works were not in pursuance of some scheme laid down by Himself, but such as entered into God's scheme for Him, such as the Father had prepared for Him to walk in.

I. And, first, notice His discourses, both in their occasions, and in their contexture.

(1) They most often take their rise from some object which is thrown across His path in nature, from some occurrence which takes place under His eyes, or from some question which is put to Him. For the wonderful discourse in John vi. upon the Living Bread, we are

entirely indebted to the circumstance that after the miracle of the loaves the carnal multitude sought Him, in anxiety to have their natural wants once again satisfied by miracle. It was not that Jesus had previously prepared for them such a discourse; but this was the discourse which their conduct drew from Him.-He meets a Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, and oppressed with the noontide heat, asks her for water from her bucket. Her answer leads on to a close dealing with the woman's conscience, and to the announcement of certain great truths respecting that living Water, whereof whosoever drinketh shall never thirst. But here again the words rise spontaneously from the occasion. The murmurs of the Pharisees and Scribes, because Jesus received sinners and ate with them, elicited for our everlasting consolation the noble parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son.-An observation falling from a guest at table, a mere devout sentiment casually dropped in His hearing, "Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God," drew from His lips the parable of the great Supper.-A certain man asked Him to undertake an arbitration between himself and his brother as to their respective shares of their hereditary property. This suggested to Our Lord the topic of covetousness, and the parable of the rich fool, illustrative of that topic.

All the above are instances in which Scripture itself explicitly traces the connexion between certain occasions and the discourses of Our Lord. And divines have recognized many others, where the connexion, though not expressed, is not obscurely implied.

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(2) But a similar remark holds good respecting the contexture of these wonderful discourses. Jesus spake as never man spake," as never wise man after the flesh had any idea of speaking. For Our Lord's great discourses are not constructed upon any such method or plan, as the human intellect recognizes. Pascal somewhere remarks that there are two orders of discourse, one which he calls the order of the intellect, the other the order of love. The order of the intellect is

to have an exordium, a series of arguments bearing on the matter in hand, a series of illustrations, and what is called a peroration or close. This order does not admit of divergences or digressions; any interruptions of the plan are to the mere intellect impertinences, and the pruning-knife of a merely intellectual critic would cut them unsparingly away. The order of love, on the other hand, says this truly spiritual writer, is to have a heart so penetrated with the subject, as to be impatient of the restraints of intellectual method, and to burst away in pursuit of favourite topics, as the mind within suggests. This, says he, is the only order observed in the writings of St. Augustine and St. Paul, and in the discourses of their Divine Master, Jesus Christ. And the remark is pre-eminently true. Take the Sermon on the Mount, and try to analyze it. You will find that it defies methodical analysis. While no head of Christian precept is left untouched, there is no such systematic arrangement as we can easily put upon paper. There was no doubt an undercurrent of thought in the mind of the Divine Preacher, welding together the different sections of the great Sermon, and leading Him on fluently from topic to topic; but nothing can less wear the aspect of a discourse framed upon a dry preconceived plan. Doubtless it was as the swallow caught His eye, skimming along to its nest with food for its young, and as the lily or blue-bell of Palestine waved before Him on the hill-side, that He took occasion to illustrate His precepts against worldly carefulness by those wonderful sections, beginning, “Behold the fowls of the air,' ""Consider the lilies of the field." This is the only plan observable in the discourse, the plan of a loving heart pouring itself out, as occasion serves, for the edification of mankind.

II. But the absence of mere human plan, or rather strict faithfulness to the plan of God, as hourly developed by the movements of His Providence, characterizes the life of Our Lord even more than His discourses. His object throughout is not to carry out schemes preconceived by Himself, but to study God's

guidings, and to be true to God's occasions and God's inspirations. Take only that portion of His life recorded in a single chapter,—the ninth of St. Matthew. Jesus is interrupted in the midst of a discourse which He was holding in the house, by the appearance of a couch with a palsied man upon it, lowered into the midst of the court under His eyes. So far from accounting the interruption unseasonable, He first absolves, and then heals the patient, and thus secures glory to God from the multitude. The miracle performed, He passes out into the open air, perhaps for refreshment, and His eye catches Matthew sitting at the receipt of custom. He calls him, and Matthew follows. Matthew invites Our Lord to a meal, and our Lord accepts the invitation; sits down with publicans and sinners, and profits by the occasion to speak of the freeness of His Grace.-In connexion probably with His appearance at a festival, the disciples of John ask Him why His disciples did not fast. He explains why. Jairus comes to solicit His merciful interference in behalf of a dying daughter. Jesus follows him forthwith to his house, when, lo and behold, another interruption, which to the feelings of Jairus, all impatient to have the great Healer under his roof, must have been extremely galling. The woman with an issue of blood steals a cure from Him on the road. Jesus stops to draw from her an acknowledgment of the benefit, and to dismiss her with a word of consolation and blessing. Then He resumes His former errand of love, arrives at Jairus' house, and raises the dead maiden.-Coming out, probably on His return to His own abode, the blind men follow Him into the house, and receive their cure. They have scarcely gone out, when the man possessed with a dumb devil is brought to Him, and restored; and thus ends the detailed portion of the chapter, what follows being a general and summary survey.

This is a good specimen of Our Lord's whole way of life, and of how He went about doing good, not on a rigid, unbending, preconcerted plan, but as the Father,